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Just Walk On By Brent Staples Analysis

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Societies and cultures often contain one thing that can exponentially affect one’s life: stereotypes. Brent Staples, author of “Just Walk On By” creates the message that many are being held to certain stereotypes that often make life difficult. He conveys this message through the persona he creates along with his emotional appeal. Brent Staples is able to create a persona which serves to convey his message that society places stereotypes on certain races, including African Americans, which create hardships within the lives of those affected by these stereotypes. He is able to create a persona using diction and imagery. The author brings up an African American’s ability to “alter space in ugly ways” (Staples 542). The word “ugly” in this line serves primarily to indicate how afraid people are and how Staples’ surroundings can change drastically in negative ways to support his message. Additionally, Staples uses diction in a contradicting way to help support his message. In order to illustrate the difference in societies, the writer employs contrasting words such as “affluent” and “impoverished” to emphasize the difference between the little park the author introduced to us in the beginning of the narrative with the overall city of Chicago and why a woman might have been afraid of him. This supports his message that stereotypes, even those placed on cities and races, can influence how people act. This shows that the author built his persona as one who means well, yet society misunderstood him. Additionally, the author’s use of imagery serves to show his persona …show more content…

From his years of stereotypes came the need to write a narrative where he is able to convey this message regarding stereotypes by creating a persona and emotional appeals. Assumptions created from stereotypes can often lead to one’s

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In Brent Staples “Just walk on by” he uses ethos to show the reader that he is a kind men. Staples has been perceived dangerous because of his color. One of the first instance he recalls, “one night in Chicago a women misjudged Staples to be a mugger, leaving him with humiliated. Others thought he was dangerous. Staples later moved to New York where he had similar encounters.

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In the non fiction article by Zeba Khan she conveys her supposition that identity is something one chooses rather than something based upon societal perception by using sarcasm, and using stereotypes to back up her ideas. By using stereotypes to help combine claims with facts this helps her exhibit her ideas. To first begin the topic,Stereotypes present a good position for an argument by representing a common struggle between the reader and author.many people have been put under a situation where they were portrayed as a different image because of an assumption that someone made. This helps connect the reader with the author to share similar connections which in turn helps convey the author’s ideas more thoroughly to the reader. For instance

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The message that Brent Staples is trying to convey to the audience in his essay Just Walk On By, is that as a society we have positive and negative preconceived thoughts of other people who are of either the same or different race and gender. For Staples, this means that as a tall black man he has to deal with being seen as deadly and threatening to people who don’t know him. These people let their fear of biased opinions of black men think that all tall, black, and athletic men are going to attack them. Brent uses his stories of people’s fear and judgement of him, to allow the reader to both understand what the people were feeling and how he felt being judged. Brent Staples’ persona helps the message through the use of strong diction.

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Brent Staples, in his literary essay “Just Walk On By”, uses a variety of rhetorical strategies. The devices he uses throughout his essay effectively engage the audience in a series of his own personal anecdotes and thoughts. He specifically shifts the reader 's perspective towards the unvoiced and the judged. Within the essay, Staples manipulates several rhetorical strategies, such as perspective and metaphor, in order to emphasize the damage stereotypes have caused against the mindsets and perceptions of society as a whole. Staples illustrates how the nature of stereotypes can affect how we perceive others around us in either an excessively admirable light or, in his and many other cases, as barbaric or antagonistic.

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Author and editorial writer, Brent Staples acknowledges this issue as well as experience many situations in which people distinguish him from others. Brent Staples message in his essay titled “Just Walk On By” is conveyed to the audience through many rhetorical devices in which he suggests that stereotypes of race and gender can impact someone 's life in the easiest ways. Brent Staples use of pathos creates an emotional connection and pulls the reader into his essay, through his anecdotes and diction. His intro paragraph tells an interesting story, in a way that readers often forget what type of passage they are reading. Staples uses of phrases such as “my first victim”, “seemed menacingly close” “picked up her pace” and notably “running in earnest” (1-2).

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