The Fear of Stereotypes
The narrator, in Brent Staples’ Black Men and Public Spaces, finds himself bothered by the fear response that he invokes in others. He attributes this response to his being black. He too though shows himself to get caught up in the fear of stereotypes, attributing their response to his skin color and failing to see the natural fear response that is evoked in people when they are in a situation that is unfamiliar to them, and through conditioning, perceive it to be threatening to their fundamental, all encompassing, humanistic need to survive.
He overlooks these details in many situations. Because he feels that they are stereotyping him based on the color of his skin he allows himself to get upset over these situations rather than understand them. He speaks of giving other subway goers room to ease their worries about his skin color but it has become natural for subway goers to be weary of other passengers because of the extensive amount of talk or writing that goes around about all of the subway fatalities and incidents that occur by men and women, whites and minorities, young and old and even the ones that appear to be normal and the ones that obviously seem disturbed. Him running into the office of a magazine he works for with a deadline paper in hand and being thought to be a burglar is also something he attributes to his race; “Black men trade tales like this all the time” (para10). He fails to make a paralleling scene in which a white man is running into the office of a magazine that he works for, and although not always in time, due to recent experiences now gets mistaken as a ‘disgruntled’ employee bent on mal intent and is detained.
He is his “first victim.” By attributing the situations around him relating to fear, to stereotypes that he feels everyone has about his skin color, he is victimizing himself to that stereotype by failing to look more into their responses as he feels they are failing to look more into his characteristics because of that same stereotype. Woman have been conditioned to fear men because of their strength and dominance. Men have been conditioned to fear woman because of the affect they can have on them. Minorities fear whites because of experiences of oppression and persecution. Whites have been conditioned to fear blacks because of the potentials they have because of their fear. The old have been conditioned to fear the young because they will take their jobs or loves and the young and been conditioned to fear the old because of their lack of experience and knowledge compared to their older counterparts. All of these are due to the classical conditioning of pairing the naturalistic response of fear meant to help us survive, to our experiences that have promoted fear in us in the past due to being unfamiliar with them, being warned of them, and first hand experience.
A woman raised around a wide type of males who respect her is less likely to feel threatened around them in day to day situations than a woman who has been raped or abused by them. It’s counterpart is just as likely true. If a man is raised around nurturing females who respect him, he is more likely to grow up to respect them than a man who has no mother or little positive interactions with females. If I were to say that as an only black kid going to an all white school I was the subject of ridicule and physical confrontations, like the narrator, I could attribute this to skin color. I could also say though that as the only white kid going to an all black school I was the subject of ridicule and physical confrontations and this would also be true. This comparison then shows that it is not the color of skin which was feared and sometimes attacked, but the difference.
The Narrator feels “surprised, embarrassed and dismayed all at once” (para2) because of the way people respond to him because he knows himself to be “a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken, let alone hold one to a person’s throat” (para2). He is that way because of his experiences and just as he can’t see the way they are because of their experiences, they cannot see the way he is because of his. As he falls back on whistling classical music and finding ways to appear less intimidating to alleviate his fear of seeing their response, they fall back on the ways they know of to protect themselves. He doesn’t see that he is not alleviating their fear of skin color, he is alleviating their fear of the experiential response their surroundings evoke by appealing to their less stressed experiences. He fails to see that he is not alleviating the real problem of his own fear that he brings to the situations and that stereotypes even just “being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself” (para2). He first realizes that he invokes fear in people when, suffering from insomnia, “he stalks sleep, not defenseless wayfarers” (para2) but is perceived as doing so by a young woman. After giving him a few quick glances she runs away and he attributes this to him being black; “to her, the youngish Blackman…..seemed menacingly close.” He states the outside factors showing that they play a part. Largely though, he contributes this to his color by pointing out the surrounding ghetto and stating that she had failed to distinguish him from them. He fails to see that the fact that he came upon her late at night on a street that only the two of them were on with his “broad six feet two inches” (para2), had triggered in her a natural “fight or flight” response to which her body checked with her experiential knowledge and choose to run. He felt she had made a judgment about his skin and in turn he made a judgment about her response to him. Fear is a natural response but the triggers for the fear are due to personal direct or indirect experiences. If skin color had been a factor it was likely due to the experiences she had or heard about the surrounding ghetto that made her feel that to take the risk to find out about his more private characteristics, based on his physical ones, was just too perilous. Just as he summed up his experiences of people of her appearance and made the judgment that she was a “victim” of not being able to look past his skin color and appearance and the ‘stereotypes’ he felt were associated with them.
