Analysis Of Richard Rodriguez And Black Boy By Richard Wright

To show first hand to the whites the inequality’s and hardships that the blacks face, the entire first section is in a narrative and a descriptive format. The use of these types of essays lets the readers feel more involved in the story and feel things for themselves. Split into two sections within itself, this first paragraph juxtaposes two stories — one about a “young Negro boy” living in Harlem, and the other about a “young Negro girl” living in Birmingham. The parallelism in the sentence structures of introducing the children likens them even more — despite the differences between them — whether it be their far away location, or their differing, yet still awful, situations. Since this section is focused more towards his white audience, King goes into a description of what it was like living as an African American in those times— a situation the black audience knew all too well. His intense word choice of describing the boy’s house as “vermin-infested” provokes a very negative reaction due to the bad

Paragraph 98, as with the majority of the text, utilizes symbolism to communicate the pervasive, institutionalized nature of anti-blackness. The narrator, still recovering from attempting to deliver a speech in the style of Booker T Washington to an audience of white men while simultaneously “swallowing blood” after being forced to fight blindly against members of his own Black community, finds himself gifted a “gleaming calfskin brief case” from the local superintendent. The brief case, connotatively signifying notions of power, wealth, and corporate success, is a symbolic transition of power to the narrator by someone fully established in the position of the oppressor. However, the text characterizes this transition of power as fraudulent or superficial. First, the superintendent addresses the narrator as a “[b]oy” in a linguistic assertion of dominance and power. Continually, the superintendent implies that the brief case will only be “filled with important papers” if the narrator “[k]eeps developing as [he is].” In characterizing the narrator’s endurance and acceptance of overt anti-black violence, as well as his advocacy of the dismissive and conservative philosophies of Booker T Washington, as “developing,” the superintendent’s language symbolizes a broader desire for those in positions of power and privilege to encourage marginalized individuals to submit to systems of violence and oppression. To contextualize, the text employs the symbol of the brief case to argue that when oppressed individuals receive ‘help’ from the system, the system’s position of benefit from oppressing those individuals will ensure that that ‘help’ is never genuine nor effective.

Reading the content in this book made me get a picture of what it was like to be a colored person in this time. My eyes were opened to the meaning of the word “nigga”. Nigga is such a derogatory term, yet now-a-days it is used by people so much. Kids in this generation use it as a term of endearment when they see their friends, or they say it when they are shocked by something. Frankly, I don’t believe they know how serious it really is. The fact that white people could look at a person and see less than a human being when they did nothing wrong distresses me. They (white people) treated them as if they were property and below them. Even though we don’t have racism to this extent

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.” –Richard Wright, Black Boy. The author suffered and lived through an isolated society, where books were the only option for him to escape the reality of the world. Wright wrote this fictionalized book about his childhood and adulthood to portray the dark and cruel civilization and to illustrate the difficulties that blacks had, living in a world run by whites.

Richard Wright’s “Native Son” Bigger shows us the short end of the stick of how it feels to be seen as a second-class citizen for being black. His speech talking about how he feels like a prisoner in this world just because he is black. (Wright P.17) This prison pain of Bigger in Wright’s novel shows how the negative effects of fear and discrimination affect minorities in our society. This discrimination just for existence is mirrored in the “Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Color of Water”. In the Diary of Anne Frank, spends two years of her life in an attic with her family and other Jewish people, hiding from the government trying to capture them just because they are Jewish. In “The Color of Water” Ruth McBride describes how the KKK was a huge part of her hometown. That whenever a car full of white hoods drove past, any African Americans in the store would run home, Ruth did the same thing, knowing her family was also in danger. (McBride P.58)

Black Boy is an autobiography of Richard Wright who grew up in the backwoods of Mississippi. He lived in poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and had rage towards those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. He was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common people who were slaves or struggling.

Huckleberry Finn Is Not to be Sivilized Censorship has always been a controversial subject, particularly when the materials in question are works of literature hailed as American classics. Despite the throngs of adoring fans who undyingly advocate for their favorite stories, certain novels are repeatedly called into question, chief among them The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. 219 occurrences of the N-word have earned the novel a multitude of challenges for crude and offensive language (Source F). However, this single word is fundamental to Mark Twain’s message.

In the “Blueprint,” Wright describes Negro Writer’s use of misdirection and how the writers “have been far better to others than they have been to themselves” (98), which

He asserts his claim to the reader that America was built on the hard work and mistreatment of blacks while white men abused their power and got rewarded for their work. Reward in which blacks “could not see” (Ellison 186). The effect of these beginning stages of oppression for blacks are psychological. As articulated in Naylor’s piece, the term “nigger” is used to belittle blacks. She writes, “He snatched his test from me and spit out that word. Had he called me a nymphomaniac or a necrophiliac, I couldn’t have been more puzzled. I didn’t know what nigger was, but I knew that whatever it meant, it was something he shouldn’t have called me” (Naylor 1). Through the personal narration, Naylor invokes a sense of empathy to her experience that is common for many African Americans. The racial bigotry taught to this young boy stings the author. When she states he “snatched his test from me and spit out that word”, Naylor asserts the haughtiness of that word. The same emotions that blacks have felt for years toward it. that young white boy was taught to use that word to hate and to humiliate and he succeed.

   In the early twentieth century black American writers started employing modernist ways of argumentation to come up with possible answers to the race question. Two of the most outstanding figures of them on both, the literary and the political level, were Richard Wright, the "most important voice in black American literature for the first half of the twentieth century" (Norton, 548) and his contemporary Ralph Ellison, "one of the most footnoted writers in American literary history" (Norton, 700). In this paper I want to compare Wright's autobiography "Black Boy" with Ellison's novel "Invisible Man" and, in doing so, assess the effectiveness of their conclusions.

“The novel in fact becomes extremely coherent, but both liberals and Communists were white and alike failed to see that Wright gave priority to his point of view as a black man.” (Michel Fabre, 205)

Set in Chicago in the early 1930s Richard Wright’s Native Son brings the Africanist presence to the front by focusing on the life of a black youth whose first direct encounter with the white society from which he is alienated leads him to accidentally kill a rich white heiress. This incidental misconduct spirals into a series of other crimes—the decapitation and burning of Mary’s corpse, the incrimination of the girl’s communist boyfriend, the forgery of kidnapping notes asking for ransom, and above all, his most terrible sin, though belittled by the white prosecuting officer of the State of Illinois, his plotting and murdering of his girlfriend Bessie after abusing her sexually. The context of the novel is clearly that of a disordered society where violence can explode at any moment. Though the plot seems extreme, Wright argued that the scenario was really possible reflecting the era’s laws that threatened blacks’ civil liberties and mandated racial segregation through a system of social control that divided black and white Americans. Schools, restaurants and public transportation are just a few of the public amenities that were separated by color, while subtler laws addressed the “social etiquette” of black and white communication. Anyone violating the laws’ codes was subject to severe punitive action. Though not based on fact, the myths of blacks as being of an inferior and dangerous group were

Richard Wright’s plead in the Blueprint for Negro Writing could be very well summarized in one of the famous words from Thomas Kempis, “Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” In this popular essay, Richard Wright denounced the Negro writers as he perceived them to be merely begging for the sympathy of the bourgeoisie instead of striving to present a life that is more worth living for the Black Americans (Mitchell 98). This paper argues that Richard Wright was justified in his assessment that literature was so concentrated on pandering to white readers thereby neglecting the needs of the “Negro

Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, depicts the life of the general black community in Chicago during the 1930’s. Though African Americans had been freed from slavery, they were still burdened with financial and social oppression. Forced to live in small, unclean quarters, eat foods on the verge of going bad, and pay entirely too much for both, these people struggled not to be pressured into a dangerous state of mind (Bryant). All the while, they are expected to act subserviently before their oppressors. These conditions rub many the wrong way, especially Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the story. Though everyone he is surrounded by is going through all the same things that he is, growing up poor and uneducated has made Bigger angry at the whole world. You can see this anger in everything he does, from his initial thoughts to his final actions. Because of this, Bigger Thomas almost seems destined to find trouble and meet a horrible fate. Wright uses these conventions of naturalism to develop Bigger’s view of the white community(). With all of these complications, Bigger begins to view all white people as an overwhelming force that drags him to his end. Wright pushes the readers into Bigger’s mind, thoroughly explaining Bigger’s personal decay. Even Wright himself says that Bigger is in fact a native son, just a “product of American culture and the violence and racism that suffuse it” (Wright).

Richard Wright explores the theme, one will often find that society’s expectations and beliefs may negatively affect an individual’s life through his autobiography, Black Boy. Wright employs an overstatement in his quote, “Kill that damn thing [kitten]” (Wright, XXX). Wright exaggerates the amount of anger that radiates from Richard’s father. Richard’s father comes home from a long night of work and he wants to rest, but the kitten continues to meow. The kitten refuses to quiet down and continues to disturb Richard’s father from resting peacefully. Richard becomes upset over his father’s expectations, since he insists on Richard to follow all of his commands and decides to avenge his frustration by taking his father’s command to kill the kitten literally. The hyperbole furthers Wright’s theme, society expectations may negatively affect an individual because society expects Richard to follow every command that he is given, without any question. Richard refuses to abide by his father’s will and finds that he suffers the consequences of his disobedience. Richard experiences a lot of guilt and his mother punishes him greatly for it. His mother forces Richard to kill the kitten, where he fears that the kitten’s ghost will come back to haunt him. Richard’s life is negatively impacted because he discovers that his rebellious act of killing the kitten failed to satisfy his drive of revealing his father’s misdoing. The scene holds significance because Richard killed the kitten by