Unwieldy Inheritance: Issue of Conformity in “Black Men in Public Spaces” and “Why My Mother Can’t Speak English”

Issue of Conformity 1
Unwieldy Inheritance: Issue of Conformity in “Black Men in Public Spaces” and “Why My Mother Can’t
Speak English”

Issue of Conformity 2
Identities in a society are not always defined by ways of legal norms that ascribe statuses to an
individual. Identities entail multi-dimensional definitions. They are determined by caste, colour, creed, race,
geography, language and, mostly, to what degree is one able to conform to normative of the society.
However, there are no clear categorisation of these as well. An individual can be non-conforming if he/she
cannot speak the dominant language and, supplementing this fact can be the different religion to which
he/she belongs. An individual can be called non-conforming if he/she is “coloured” differently from the
populous dominant and, supplementing this fact can be his/her gender. Therefore, a woman from a minority
community is “doubly in shadow” because she is a woman in a patriarchal society and one who belongs to
the populous minor. (Spivak, p. 84)
For interdisciplinary approaches toward literary texts, such as identification of non-conforming
issues, it is important to locate the concerned text in particular context. Thus, in light of the fact that “Black
Men in Public Spaces” by Brent Staples that appeared first in 1986, contextualises various issues of the
apartheid, the Great Migration as well as the Emancipation Proclamation. So the “unwieldy inheritance”
(Staples, para. 2) that the narrator talks of in his essay “Black Men in Public Spaces” includes his own self
not as an individual but as a collective representative of the inheritance of a past heavily loaded with racial
prejudice, perpetual struggle and extreme violence that had overwhelmed the country of America for
decades. The “woman – white” (Staples, para. 1) made the narrator “feel like an accomplice in tyranny”
(Staples, para. 2). Seeing a tall black man in jeans and jacket at night made her feel afraid, violated in
anticipation and, she took him as one of those “young black males [who are] drastically overrepresented
among the perpetrators of ... violence” (Staples, para. 5). Irrespective of the fact that the narrator had grown
up to be “one of the good boys” (Staples, para. 6) even after witnessing gang-warfare, street knifings and
murders, the “language of fear” (Staples, para. 3) has been imposed upon him in due course. He has been
successfully ‘otherised’. Following a long history of racial clashes up to the point where the blacks have
been stereotyped as vulgar (rap music), ugly (white superiority) and criminals, African-Americans have
been subjected to marginalisation from the dominant white classes of the country. Staples goes on to give
other instances where he has been unjustly subjected to racism until he accepts the fact that he shall always