Showing readers a glimpse of the life of an African American man in the year 1986, Brent Staples’s memoir, “Black Men and Public Space” unmasks the racism embedded in American society even to this day. Staples’s experiences during his life, more specifically in 1968, show the oppression fixed upon the minority of Africans in America. The first line of the article ‘My first victim was a white woman’ (Staples) starts off forcing the believer to think he a rapist or a murderer. He puts you in this assumption to give the reader the point of view that the general public had of him and other African Americans during this time. The author does not voice his opinion as the main point of the article, in the reasoning that many had already done so without
