Just Walk On By Brent Staples Analysis
In “Just Walk on By” the author, Brent Staples, uses his real life experiences and gives a great explanation to how the blacks were mistreated during his lifetime. The stories that he tells in this article take place during the center of the Civil Rights Movement. He gives us several stories in this article of situations that he was put in. The first paragraph of his article really grabs the reader's attention. He starts off with “My first victim was a woman white, well-dressed probably in her early twenties.” This first statement grabs you and makes you want to read more. He also uses excerpts of other black men who dealt with the same situations as he did. Brent Staples’ purpose of this article is to show that in today's society the same
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occasions are still appearing from what happen to him over a half-century ago. SUMMARIZE MORE The audience that Brent Staples is trying to catch could be anyone. This article would impact readers differently depending on who was reading it. This topic was not just a huge problem in the 1960’s, but is now a problem in today’s society. In the year 2015, this topic is as big or bigger than it was then. The way the audience responds to him depends on a few situations: where the reader is from, how old the reader is, and what ethnicity the reader is. The author uses the audience's emotions as they read his article to ask the question; Is it right to discriminate a man just because he fits the stereotypical ? The author uses real life experiences of situations that he was put in during this time period just because he looked like the stereotypical bad guy.
He says in article In this article he uses several ethos. He states that “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.”, which leads the reader to believe that he grew up in a rough small town in Pennsylvania, but was not affiliated with the gang warfare backdrop. Another example of ethos is when he says “The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar.”, he tells us that he works as a journalist and was mistaken for a burglar in his own work place, because he was a black man rushing into a building. While Brent Staples uses ethos, he also uses pathos. In the first paragraph he uses phrases like “worried glance” and “menacingly close” to show emotion through the article. Brent Staples says “Unfortunately, poor and powerless young men seem to take all this nonsense literally. As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried
several, too.”
This article by Brent Staples has in my opinion met its purpose. This article was written to not only show how the blacks were mistreated during the Civil Rights Movements, but how discrimination and prejudice still exists in the twenty-first century.
occasions are still appearing from what happen to him over a half-century ago. SUMMARIZE MORE The audience that Brent Staples is trying to catch could be anyone. This article would impact readers differently depending on who was reading it. This topic was not just a huge problem in the 1960’s, but is now a problem in today’s society. In the year 2015, this topic is as big or bigger than it was then. The way the audience responds to him depends on a few situations: where the reader is from, how old the reader is, and what ethnicity the reader is. The author uses the audience's emotions as they read his article to ask the question; Is it right to discriminate a man just because he fits the stereotypical ? The author uses real life experiences of situations that he was put in during this time period just because he looked like the stereotypical bad guy.
He says in article In this article he uses several ethos. He states that “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.”, which leads the reader to believe that he grew up in a rough small town in Pennsylvania, but was not affiliated with the gang warfare backdrop. Another example of ethos is when he says “The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar.”, he tells us that he works as a journalist and was mistaken for a burglar in his own work place, because he was a black man rushing into a building. While Brent Staples uses ethos, he also uses pathos. In the first paragraph he uses phrases like “worried glance” and “menacingly close” to show emotion through the article. Brent Staples says “Unfortunately, poor and powerless young men seem to take all this nonsense literally. As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried
several, too.”
This article by Brent Staples has in my opinion met its purpose. This article was written to not only show how the blacks were mistreated during the Civil Rights Movements, but how discrimination and prejudice still exists in the twenty-first century.