Not Racist but....Sexist?

In Brent Staple's piece "Black Men and Public Space", he explains the hardships of being labeled as dangerous by strangers simply because of his race. Staples comes to terms with the stereotypes automatically attached to him and learns to live with them. The general attitude of the piece is positive. Even though Staples is expressing his frustration with the way people judge him because of his race, he doesn't have a 'woe-is-me' attitude. The main focus point in this piece is Staples race, but I picked up on an underlying theme: gender. In all examples and anecdotes Staples uses, he is either intimidating a woman or he is not gender specific. In his first paragraph, he writes about a woman who started running when she saw him coming down the street. He also writes about going into a jewelry shop, where the female proprietor brought out a guard dog to get him to leave. In paragraph five, he writes "After dark...I often see women who fear the worst from me", and then states that women are very vulnerable to violence. However, he makes no mention of men. The he implies that men are effected by his presence is when he writes about people, "black, white, male, or female" (paragraph 2), who lock their car doors when he crosses the street in front of them. All his examples make women look weak. Not only that, but because he uses the examples to prove that people are judging him incorrectly, he makes women look foolish for being scared of him. His point was that he affects the atmosphere around him in negative ways, but I think he should have represented both sexes more equally. We no longer live in a world where women are defenseless. Many women can fend for themselves, some even better than other men! Staple's portrayal of women is sexist and slightly offensive.