Syd the Sloth

Brent Staples' essay was deeply tragic in only a few pages. When he recalled crossing the street and hearing all the car doors lock, it inspired such heavy sadness for me which is exactly what I imagine he was trying to do. It was such a powerful recollection because even though I am a white woman, I could imagine how much that broke his spirit as a human. In particular with this essay, I think it is vitally important to consider the perspective one brings to this essay. I am a white woman, and people are not afraid of me. My race and gender does not lend itself well to fear in modern American culture because of how people have been historically categorized and treated. This is not the case with Staples and I know he did an excellent job of showing the upset and outrage of being criminalized and stereotyped because even with my opposite race and gender, I cannot help but get angry with him as he tells his story. The purpose of this essay was to inspire sadness in order to motivate ...

This essay was compelling and easy to read because it had several themes that I thought intertwined nicely. Coming of age, would be the first and probably most obvious one because it was all about how she thought of breasts as a symbol of not only womanhood but also adulthood. I felt like she told a story about how becoming an adult is different from becoming a woman, and she had several markers of womanhood such as menstruating, marriage, intercourse, and of course, her breasts. When those milestones didn't come about as she wanted them to or expected, her whole journey of maturation of womanhood was thrown off, but not necessarily maturation as an adult. All of this maturation and growing up was juxtaposed by a immature seeming competitiveness with her best friend as a kid, but also with her supposed mother in law and people in her life as a grown woman. Her struggle with her personal perception of her body was representative of the struggle many women have against the patriarchy...