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Just Walk On By Brent Staples Analysis

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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. Staples uses words such as ‘victim’ and ‘mean’, by doing this he sets a picture in the readers head that when he came up behind this lady on the street, something was going to do happen to her. One strategy of ethos appeal that staples uses to represent himself as exactly the opposite of the negative stereotypes. He states “As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken – let alone hold it to a person's throat – I was surprise, embarrassed, and dismayed all at …show more content…

Staples use the word softly to confront the reader and to have a connecting with the reader’s emotions. Although he may be black he doesn't want to cause harm to anyone. The white woman is stereotyping him as a dangerous black man, even though she's wrong. Even though he may look like it to her when he came up behind her, he is not dangerous and does not want to harm her. As Staples continues, he begins to reveal his own emotions about the situation stating that he was made to feel guilty, and even annoyed. By changing immediately from identifying the woman as his victim to then stating how her response caused him to feel bad about himself, he starts to allow the reader to empathize with him and really involves them in the emotional state. Staples does an outstanding job in drawing a guilty sensation from the audience. "I grew accustomed to never being comfortable”. This is one of the most influential statements in this passage because it makes the reader begin to feel guilt and really put themselves in the writer's shoes, drawing a huge emotional response to

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