Walk On By Brent Staples Analysis

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Walk on By

In the article “Walk on By” by Brent Staples, he gives several personal examples of how people react to him on the streets simply because he is black. The black male body instills fear in people in public spaces due to what the media influence, music and movies portray. Many people refer to black folks as being aggressive, rude and disrespectful. The fear that some people have of black men is convenient pretense for abuse of everything from racial privilege to police power. People are still ignorant and guilty of generalizations. There are several reasons why people are afraid of black people. One of the reasons why the black male body instills fear is because of the way social media refer to them. The media often
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The scandal with racist cops in the United States continues to get worse. Many people were fearing the worst, that these officers actually arrested or abused people for the color of their skin or their sexual orientation. Now it appears those fears are being taken seriously. More than a hundred people of all ages have been killed by police officers, many of them were unarmed at all the time if their death. In the passage it quotes, “One day, rushing into the officer of magazine I was writing for with a deadlines story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called the security and, with an ad hoc posse pursued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving who I was” paragraph 10 (page 5). This is an evidence of how people react when seeing a black person. Another example of this is Erick Garner, who was apprehended for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. He died after an officer on the scene put him in a chokehold. It seems like black people’s lives do not

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