Night By Brent Staples Analysis

In this essay, Staples discusses what it is like to be a black male in Chicago, and what he has to do to make people feel less threatened around him. One night during college, he was walking on streets at dark when he came upon a woman in her twenties. They were in Hyde Park and as she had seen him, she picked up her pace and scurried down the streets with a fearful look on her face. That was the first time something like that had happen to him. He made it clear that the woman obviously thought he was a rapist or a muggar. But he wasn’t either, just a man walking in the streets. After the first encounter and the others that followed, Staples had realized that with nighttime pedestrians always running away, they had made him feel less confident. …show more content…
He takes more precautions when walking around late at night. He started whistling Vivaldi and Beethoven to tell people that he isn’t dangerous. I would expect that the first woman he encountered first would kind of run away because not many people walk around late at night. It is more of a natural reaction to something like that is to run away, because you never know who the other person is or what they want. People who walk around at night should consider that they might be feared by other people because not many people walk around in the middle of the night. I would expect him to be a little hurt because most individuals don’t want to be feared or have someone run away from them. I know I would not feel great if someone ran away from me because I was assumed to be something I was not. I’d expect him to get angry and may become the person they’d perceived him to be, but he says later “I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have lead to madness.” He should have to smother his rage or the way he feels because of the prejudice that caused it. Even though the essay was unfair and frustrating, Staples still didn’t let that affect him or the way he