Critical Analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 13

Critical Analysis - Essay Example The essay opens up with the story of Dr. Spiners â€Å"first victim†. Well, technically the woman in his story was not a victim since no physical harm actually came to her. Rather she suffered from fear of a psychological mindset that had been fed and nurtured by the White American society since the time of slavery in the South. He was just a young graduate student of the University of Chicago then. But what he learned from that night when the woman, who pulled away from the same sidewalk he was walking on in terror, thinking she was going to be attacked, taught him that as a Black man living in a predominantly White society, it was up to him to change the way that these people would see him even without knowing him. Using a quote from the list that was supplied to us for this reading, I believe that the following passage best describes the realization that occurred that night when Dr. Spiner was walking down that Chicago sidewalk in the middle of the night:"It was in the echo of that terrified womans footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance Id come into- the ability to alter public space in ugly ways." ï ¼Ë†Pg. 53). In his statement, Dr. Spiner is making direct reference to the history of Blacks in the United States. Touching on the fact that the White men had been raised to fear Black people, there is a sense of disgust when one considers that the reason the woman feared him was quite similar to the reasons that Trayvon Martin had lost his life. He was racially profiled and as such, deemed to be a threat to her safety by the woman. Regardless of the fact that the man walking behind her did not dress nor look like an African-American thug. Generations of mind conditioning culminated in that very moment for that woman. It is a bit hard to understand how the presence of a person of alternate skin color can easily change the safety factor of a certain place. Yet that is exactly what