When I taught Pitt’s required first-year course, Seminar in Composition, I assigned deeply personal works. Jennifer Sinor’s “Confluences.” Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale.” An excerpt from Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.” And Brent Staples’s “Black Men and Public Space.” Every student didn’t like at least one work from my syllabus, but a lot of them didn’t like “Black Men and Public Space.”

Most of my students were white, and the class was usually slightly more young women than men, often a twelve-to-seven ratio or so. Sometimes we had a Black student or two, and we always had students of color, Indian or Southeast Asian, Indian American, South Korean, Chinese or Chinese American.

But the majority were white women from Pennsylvania. Those young women, the bulk of the class, were usually the ones who didn’t like “Black Men and Public Space.”

His unwieldy inheritance

Now a columnist for the New York Times, Staples was a young Black man living in New York when this essay was first published in Ms. magazine in 1986. He opens by recounting one night when he was exiting the subway. A young white woman walking ahead of him, whom he calls “his first victim,” casts back “a worried glance” despite the “discreet, uninflammatory distance” between them.

Then, although he did absolutely nothing that could be considered threatening, “after a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest.” From that moment, he writes, he began to realize “the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into — an ability to alter public space in ugly ways.”

At least some of the students identified with the nameless young woman and tended to believe that she was the victim, even though nothing had been done or said to her. Probably because they, too, had felt like victims, or victims-to-be, when walking home from class at night.

Having moved from rural Pennsylvania, many of the young women (of any identity and background) had been prepped for danger. They had been given pepper-spray key chains, taken self-defense classes, and been asked to promise to call the campus police for escorts home.

While there is crime in Oakland, and bad things do happen, the campus is hardly a modern Five Points District. Yet these girls were primed to look for violence around every corner.

When we began to discuss this this piece, the vast majority of the class would argue that while it was regrettable that Staples had been made to feel bad, you can never be too careful, so the young white woman was justified in running away from him. Young men and women, of every background, made this point.

Sliding sympathy

My students were reluctant to agree that the young woman was being racist: I heard a lot of “Anyone following me that closely would scare me!”

In response to which I just turned them back to the essay to point out that he said he was not following her closely. Most of the girls in the class were unconvinced, and to be fair to them, perhaps each had at least one story of a benign-seeming man who had turned out to have ill intent in the end.

Today, I think, more students would agree that the young woman’s actions were at least informed by racism even if she did not perceive them to be. At the time, ten years ago, the most I was able to get them to agree to was that a white grandmotherly type toddling along behind the young woman would not have provoked the same fear.

Later in the essay, Staples tells an anecdote about stopping in at a jewelry store to kill some time before he conducted an interview as part of his work as a journalist. Upon his entry, the clerk disappeared and returned a moment later with a Doberman on a leash, “silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head.”

Bringing up this story slides the class’s sympathy more toward Staples. They feel the clerk is overreacting. (“It’s also not behaving badly to exit a subway station,” I or another student always pointed out.)

“The dog is a step too far. That makes her the aggressor,” someone would say.

“Okay, so why is she afraid?” I’d ask.

“Well, we don’t know the whole story,” someone would say. “Maybe he did something that was innocent but made her scared.”

And it was around here that someone would say, usually out of utter frustration, “Because he’s Black. She’s scared of him because he’s Black. Because white women are supposed to be afraid of Black men.”

An uncomfortable silence

Then everyone would get very quiet.

I loved that uncomfortable silence, which meant that people in the room were processing. I’m just a white lady from Western Pennsylvania whose high-school graduation gifts included a pepper-spray key chain. But I’ve always hated the way “You can never be too careful” victimizes women and Black or brown men at the same time.

It implies that the world is always, inevitably dangerous for women, and thus we must prioritize keeping us safe over any other concerns, whether for a sense of common humanity or for anyone else’s emotional health.

You can be too careful. You can act out of fear, a fear rooted in racism. You can overlook that you can traumatize people who sincerely and entirely meant you no harm.

So I was always glad to see my students chip away at that line of thinking. It’s not really a surprise that many of my students, across all identities, felt destabilized by this, and I’m sure that not a few of the young women readjusted back to a better safe than sorry attitude within days (minutes?) of finishing up our discussion of “Black Men and Public Space.”

But those who held on to that nuance, who could see that while the young woman acted out of what was likely her cultural training, it was also hurtful to Staples who did not mean any harm (he was both safe and sorry, as one student pointed out), I suspect they were more open to the nuance and sorrow and potential of our country’s reckoning with race.

Or perhaps they just had an uncomfortable reading experience, forced to walk in someone else’s shoes. That’s fine, too. Reading isn’t only around to make us feel cozy.

The only thing he said

The first time I had a young Black man in my class, I worried about how discussing this essay would affect him, and I hoped his classmates would not cast him in the role of Speaker for His Race.

As it turned out, the only thing he had to say was about Staples’s closing, in which the writer mentions that he’s taken to whistling when out and about at night. He writes, “It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.”

My student said, “My dad does that.”

To which none of us had anything else to say.

Shannon Reed is a teaching associate professor and director of the undergraduate studies writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. This is taken from her book “Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out” © 2024 by Shannon Reed, used with permission from Hanover Square Press/​HarperCollins.

First Published: February 25, 2024, 10:30 a.m.