When I first began reading Garnette Cadogan’s piece, “Walking While Black”, the first few pages led me to believe he was talking about awareness and his experience with this regarding the world around him. By the end of the essay I still recognized this as a key part of what he is trying to express, but just in a different aspect. The aspect of having to be hyper aware of who he was and where he was, and how this affected his life overall. Cadogan’s resistance to the fear others felt walking at night on the streets of Kingston in comparison to the fear he feels everyday in the United States, a place where people are supposed to be free to express themselves in whatever way they want, sheds light on a serious issue in this country. His story surrounding the significance of walking is not the only one being told this way, and the fact that there are so many others walking in the same shoes shows the prevalence of the problem. Cadogan speaks of how social division presents itself, both in Jamaica and in the United States, but points to the differences in how this social division applies to himself and his way of life. He sees the beauty in social division in both countries; the history, the variety in culture, the joys of individuality. Simultaneously he sees the negative end of the division, but how he personally is affected is different from each place he lived and considered his home. This swing in the way he viewed fear from one place to another stood out to me because of the way he chose to look at fear itself. In Jamaica, Cadogan didn’t allow fear to control who he was, how he dealt with his own thoughts even after people told him the streets were dangerous. In the United States he no longer had the choice of how he viewed fear. It is just a part of who he is when he is here and there is no way to escape it.
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