The two essays, Brent Staples" "Black Men and Public Space," and Debra Dickerson's "Who Shot Johnny," are very much alike. They support each other in that Staples talks about something that Dickerson goes into great detail about in her essay. .
Both authors use a narrative point of view, giving backgrounds on themselves to help the reader understand where the author is coming from. Dickerson tells the reader about her "political awareness," and tells that she "wrote a weekly column for the Harvard Law School Record." This makes her look like a strong-willed, well-educated black woman. Staples tells about how his childhood, and how seeing his relatives go "down in episodes of bravado played out in the streets" effects the way he is now. By doing this, both authors can now give their story, knowing that the reader understands what they are like and why they are like that.
The anecdotes used in both these essays were used to get the author's point across. Stapes uses many different anecdotes about people being afraid of him to show that most of the people he comes across are like that. In the story he uses to introduce his essay, Staples calls the girl who was scared of him the "victim," helping the reader get into her mind and understand that she really did think that she was going to be a victim. Dickerson uses one anecdote of her nephew being shot and paralyzed to tell about a group of blacks to which Johnny's shooter belongs. It shows how much main and suffering the family went through, yet the shooter has "no coherent explanation to offer for his act.".
Dickerson places Johnny's shooter in a group of young black males whom they have "known and feared all our lives." She stereotypes them as "a non-job-having, middle-of-the-day, malt-liquor-drinking, crotch-clutching, loud-talking brother." She says that this group is what many think "is black America," but the blacks only know him as the looser of their society.