Brent Staples focuses on his own experiences, centered around his perspective of racism and inequality. This perspective uniquely encapsulates the life of a black man with an outward image that directly affects how others perceive him as a person. Many readers, including myself, have never experienced the fear that Staples so frequently encounters. The severity of his experiences was underscored for me when he wrote: “It also made clear that I was indistinguishable from the attackers who occasionally infiltrated the area from the surrounding ghetto. » (135) Having to accept this fact as reality is something many people will never understand. It is extremely important that Staples was able to share this perspective of the world so that others can begin to understand society from a different perspective than their own..