AIB

“That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nightime pedestrians-particularly women-and me.

I chose this quote because I feel that is it a very strong statement; it’s about his experiences and how they have effected him. The writer feels that strangers, particularly women, may be afraid of him just because he is a black man. I can relate to being nervous at night and always being cautious of who is around me, but people have to realize that black men are not to blame for every bad experience when it comes to crimes and violence.

I feel the thesis is in the second paragraph and it states: “It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come to-the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.” I think this because it tells us when he started to notice he was being treated differently because he was a black man. The writer supports this by telling what happened during this first experince and how it effected him. He also supports it by sharing more examples of what happened to him; for instance, when he was mistaken for a burglar when rushing to his office to hand his boss his deadline story, when people assumed he was a criminal/mugger because of his race.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 1:28 am and is filed under Comp 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.