Just Walk on and Disrespect, Race and Obama, Essay Example

In his somewhat disturbing essay, “Just Walk on By”, Brand Staples starts with the sentence, “My first victim was a woman – white, well-dressed, probably in her early twenties.” It leads the reader to believe that this is going to be some sort of confessional of crime.  But the fact is, Staples only crime appears to be that he is black and this, apparently, is enough to really scare a lot of different people – the young woman he mentions who runs away from him, the people who lock the doors on their cars when he walks by, the woman in the jewelry store who met him with a Doberman pinscher.  Staples, somewhat wryly, notes that black men are able to “alter public spaces in unpleasant ways” just by their presence, even if they are doing nothing but taking a nighttime stroll to cure their insomnia.

What is interesting about this essay is Staples reaction to all of this: he remembers, seeing that young woman running away from him, feeling “dismayed”, and disturbed that he looked no different in her eyes than the denizens of the local ghetto who would occasional come to the wealthier neighborhood to mug people.  Later, it seems that he becomes resigned to the reactions that people have to him, giving people their space, being as non-confrontational as possible.  At no point does he seem angry or resentful of people making such bad assumptions about him.

What is most disturbing about this article is that it  had to be written at all, that so many decades after the Civil Rights movement and the supposed achievement of equality for all, that someone like Staples still has to lie low and behave in as low-key a manner as possible when he is in a public space.

The article, “Disrespect, Race and Obama” which was written by Charles Blow for the New York Times deals with the question of how much ideas about race are a factor in both those who support Obama and those who opposed him. The starting point of this article was an interview with Oprah Winfrey, who stated that the disrespect that is shown to the office of president was partly because Obama is black; Blow also mentions Rush Limbaugh’s response to this, and remarks on his “ignorance and arrogance”, two words which sum up Limbaugh very well.

Blow goes on, in a very thoughtful and sensitive way, to talk about the complexities of racial feelings in America, how a person can like or be  attracted to a member of a certain group, while still not liking that group as a whole, and how this is many ways is our inheritance from generations of slavery.  Blow is aware that racial feelings can be a very complicated thing, and easily misinterpreted by someone else; he notes that, “it is impossible to know the heart of another person”.  He also questions whether the animosity that some conservatives feel towards Obama is because of a rise in racism in America or because people are revealing the racial feelings that have always been there but have gone underground, so to speak, because of the pressure in our culture to be politically correct.

Both articles, and both written from the perspective of black men, who are not always given voice in our society, are thoughtful accounts of what kind of progress has been made in American, but also what progress still has to be made in order to achieve a true equality.

Works Cited

Blow, C. “Disrespect, Race and Obama”. New York Times Online. 2013. Web. 27 April 2014.

Staples, Brand. “Just Walk on By”. Wikispaces Website. Web. 27 April 2014.