Brent Staples (b. 1951) earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and went on to become a journalist. The
following essay originally appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1986, under the title “Just Walk On By.” Staples revised it slightly for
publication in Harper’s a year later under the present title. The particular occasion for Staples’s reflections is an incident that
occurred for the first time in the mid-1970s, when he discovered that his mere presence on the street late at night was enough to
frighten a young white woman. Recalling this incident leads him to reflect on issues of race, gender, and class in the United States.
As you read, think about why Staples chose the new title, “Black Men and Public Space.”
My first victim was a woman – white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came upon her
late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean,
impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet,
uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man
– a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky
military jacket – seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was
soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross street.
That was more than a decade ago, I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the
University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the
unwieldy inheritance I’d come into – the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought
herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep,
not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken – let alone hold one
to a person’s throat – I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made me feel like an
accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally
seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that
a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians – particularly women – and me. And I soon gathered
that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a
corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an
errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet – and they often do in
urban America – there is always the possibility of death.
In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar with the
language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and
elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver – black, white, male, or female – hammering down the door locks.
On less traveled streets after dark, I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the
other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen,
doormen, bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals before
there is any nastiness.
I moved to New York nearly two years ago and I have remained an avid night walker. In central
Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-on-one street encounters. Elsewhere – in
SoHo, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky – things can get
very taut indeed.
After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear the worst
from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps strung across their chests
bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. I understand, of course,
that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street
violence, and young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet
these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome
entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.
It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being
conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester,
Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable
against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had
perhaps a half-dozen fistfights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources.