The American Lit Wayback Machine: Confusion and Outrage: Race in Brent Staples's 'Just Walk on...

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Confusion and Outrage: Race in Brent Staples's "Just Walk on By"

and Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Story of My Body"

Brent Staples's essay "Just Walk on By" and Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Story of My Body" each address a poignant coming of age in which the author first experiences overt racism in American society. In both essays, the authors discuss in some depth the feelings of surprise and confusion that these first experiences of racial prejudice evoked in them. In reflecting on the events of the distant past, the authors are no longer confused about the nature of the events in question. Nonetheless, their descriptions of the differences between their early and later experiences of race consciousness and prejudice help to create a shared tone of reasoned moral outrage.

Staples and Cofer both make clear connections between their first encounters with overt racism and their moving into predominantly white society from their childhood homes, where they were part of the majority. In Staples's case, he grew up in a rough neighborhood in Pennsylvania, "scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders," and he was "surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once" when the white woman crossed the street to avoid him (67, 65). As an adult, Staples immediately understands the significance of the incident that begins his story, but he takes the time to examine why it surprised him: he is in a new place, where he is seen as a danger, as opposed to his relative harmlessness in the eyes of his peers in his youth. He also emphasizes that the fear he feels is related directly to being in this new place: "In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar with the language of fear" (66). Similarly, Cofer, though she is a child when the first incident occurs, attributes the racism she encounters with being in a new place, where she is not one of the dominant culture. Cofer moved from Puerto Rico, where she thought of herself as pretty, to New Jersey, where she "found out that the hierarchy for popularity was as follows: pretty white girl, pretty Jewish girl, pretty Puerto Rican girl, pretty black girl." In Puerto Rico, she says, "I did not think of the color of my skin consciously except when I heard the adults talking about complexion" (150); later, in New Jersey, when the butcher calls her "dirty," she appears to take him literally, making it clear that this is something she has never encountered before: "I could not understand how my skin looked like dirt to the supermarket man" (153).

Both Staples and Cofer emphasize the confusion they felt when they encountered racism, which underscores their shared tone of righteous outrage. Because the events happened at different stages, however, they accomplish this in different ways. Staples contrasts his benevolent motives for walking in his neighborhood at night with the utter and immediate shock he feels when those motives are assumed to be malevolent. He uses the direct experience of his epiphanic realization of his Otherness to produce a sense of the injustice of what happened. Cofer, on the other hand, is a child when she first encounters overt racism, so we are given her realization not as a moment of epiphany, but as a series of events in which the reality dawns on her. As a child, she is blissfully ignorant; as a teen, she appears to deliberately ignore the racial undertones of racially charged events: "[My mother] said very gently to me: 'You better be ready for disappointment.' I did not ask what she meant. I did not want her fears for me to taint my happiness" (158). It is clear that Cofer's teenage self does understand on some level what is about to happen, but it is important to the tone of the story that the reader understand that the young Cofer is innocent. It is not until Ted breaks their date that she seems to truly understand what is happening, and then she expresses the first true outrage in the piece: "Ted repeated his father's words to me as if I should understand his predicament when I heard why he was breaking our date" (158). In the span of telling these stories of her gradual realization of how she is treated based on racial prejudice, the sense of moral outrage builds slowly, rather than bursting into being fully formed, as it does in the Staples piece.

Cofer and Staples both make it clear that their treatment as people of color is context-dependent. The sense of surprise they both feel is a way of getting at the core truth of the injustice of their circumstance: they are moving through the world as innocents, and malevolence is thrust upon them without any misstep on their part to justify this maltreatment. They are not being judged for who they are, but for what they represent in a racist society, and for how they stack up to local codes of racial conduct. It is not some change in their inner beings that creates the change in how they are treated, but, as Cofer puts it, "the aesthetic values of the times, the places I was in, and the people I met" (159).

Works Cited

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. "The Story of My Body." The Practice of Writing. By Robert Scholes et al. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 65-69. Print.

Staples, Brent. "Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders his Power to Alter Public Space." The Practice of Writing. By Robert Scholes et al. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 65-69. Print.