Black Men And Public Spaces: A Comparative Analysis

Imagine reading a short story that makes the reader feel sympathetic for the main character, then imagine reading the same story but in a different context. While reading the two articles "Black Men and Public Spaces" and "From Parallel Time", the audience reads the story of how people react to a man because of the color of his skin. Although they tell the same story, they have many differences in the way they are written, such as the word choice and the audiences that the short stories were written for. Both of these stories talk about the same experiences, but they are both written quite differently. They are especially different in the detail that is incorporated into these pieces of work. An example from "From Parallel Time" would be,

The reader can even tell that the author wrote for a different audience in both of the writings. A few examples of this would be " Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! They hammered down the door locks when I came into view. Once I had hustled down the street, head down, trying to seem harmless. Now I turned brazenly into the headlights and laughed. Once across, I paced the sidewalk glaring until the light changes." This example is from the writing "From Parallel Time," and an example from "Black Men and Public Spaces" would be; "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 male, or female-hammering down the door locks." These examples show how the same story can be different because of the different audiences. The author wrote differently in each writing because if he had written about how obscene he acted in the article for the magazine for women, then it would not go very far in the magazine. In his autobiography, he did not need to please the audience, so he did not need to leave details out of the story that may offend or worry the readers. He would not have to worry as much because, he did not necessarily have to appeal to the population of women. This difference in writing, much like the first difference, made these two writings seem like they were completely different