Black Men and Public Space
By Brent Staples
My first victim was a woman – white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I
came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent
neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto
the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between
us. Not so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man – a broad six
feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a
bulky military jacket – seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she
picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into
a cross street.
That was more than a decade ago, I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly
arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls
that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into – the ability to alter
public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a
rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not
defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken –
let alone hold one to a person’s throat – I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at
once. Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I
was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the
surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast,
