Black Boy By Richard Wright

In Richard Wright’s novel, Black Boy, Richard is struggling to survive in a racist environment in the South. In his youth, Richard is vaguely aware of the differences between blacks and whites. He scarcely notices if a person is black or white, and views all people equally. As Richard grows older, he becomes more and more aware of how whites treat blacks, the social differences between the races, and how he is expected to act when in the presence of white people. Richard, with a rebellious nature, finds that he is torn between his need to be treated respectfully, with dignity and as an individual with value and his need to conform to the white rules of society for survival and acceptance.

Racism is an issue that blacks face, and have faced throughout history directly and indirectly. Ralph Ellison has done a great job in demonstrating the effects of racism on individual identity through a black narrator. Throughout the story, Ellison provides several examples of what the narrator faced in trying to make his-self visible and acceptable in the white culture. Ellison engages the reader so deeply in the occurrences through the narrator’s agony, confusion, and ambiguity. In order to understand the narrators plight, and to see things through his eyes, it is important to understand that main characters of the story which contributes to his plight as well as the era in which the story takes place.

White, male, New York Times writer, Michael Ian Black in his article, “The Boys Are Not All Right” (Feb. 21 2018), claims that toxic masculinity and the lack of meninism to change old stereotypes of masculinity causes men to commit mass shootings. He supports his claim by first states that women are “redefining” what it means to be a woman while men have not, then by saying that there has not been a movement to help men “toward a full expression of their gender”, next by stating that men are “trapped “in “outdated… masculinity”, and finally by stating that men only have two options to “preserve” his masculinity: “withdrawal or rage”. Black’s purpose is to illuminate another causation of mass shooting that is being ignored in order to show a

A lack of self-awareness tended the narrator’s life to seem frustrating and compelling to the reader. This lack often led him to offer generalizations about ““colored” people” without seeing them as human beings. He would often forget his own “colored” roots when doing so. He vacillated between intelligence and naivete, weak and strong will, identification with other African-Americans and a complete disavowal of them. He had a very difficult time making a decision for his life without hesitating and wondering if it would be the right one.

“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.

In his autobiographical work, Black Boy, Richard Wright wrote about his battles with hunger, abuse, and racism in the south during the early 1900's. Wright was a gifted author with a passion for writing that refused to be squelched, even when he was a young boy. To convey his attitude toward the importance of language as a key to identity and social acceptance, Wright used rhetorical techniques such as rhetorical appeals and diction.

According to Frederick Douglass, “it was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it (p.4).” Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison literatures examine the stigma of slavery, and the perceptions of its dangers. They illustrate what life was like and the mental as well social impact it had on enslaved African-Americans and their life after gaining freedom. Richard Wright convinces his audience in Black Boy that he was tired of the limitations and outcries in the South “I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that some day I might understand it, might come to know what its rigors had done to me, its children (284).” Alice Walker obtains her readers attention by transforming young women into their own characters with a voice using spiritual guidance. In Native Son, Bigger has achieved is lost after being apprehended and brought into captivity, as he transitions back into silence and passivity and begins to recover only in his final confrontation, whereas Douglass in the same prevailing convention, only heals after the regaining of his freedom. Through these literatures, and many others, African-Americans find multiple ways to alleviate and recover from the intensity of undesired bondage and bigotry.

In Black Boy, Wright expressed his childhood memories even though they were not very good. The critic, Adams, argues that Richard Wright shared his misrepresentation of his personality, rae, and family in his childhood by explaining that they did not help him. He believed that everyone prevented him from hearing or speaking the truth. The only time someone listened to him was when he lied (Adams). Wright was independent from his family early on in his childhood because he knew that they would not support his views and dreams in life. In addition, Robert J. Butler exclaims, “ … ‘red circle’ of flame which consume the curtains can be seen as a revealing symbol of Wright’s early life- a trap of spreading violence which can easily destroy him…” (Butler 62). If Richard Wright grew up to be who his parents taught him to be, he would never understand the danger of his childhood years. However, he did which let him leave it behind as soon as he could.

His mother or aunt or teacher long ago carefully prepared him, explaining that he as an individual can live in dignity, even though he as a Negro cannot. “They don’t do it to you because you’re Johnny—they don’t even know you. They do it against your Negro-ness.”” This quote, originally stated in Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin on page 45, implies how African-Americans were looked at during this particular time; inferior. African-Americans were treated like they were no more human being than the white folks. This book was great not because of the storyline, but because of the reason behind its publication.

Richard Wright is known to be one of the most influential African American writers of the 20th century. He was well known for his sometimes controversial essays and short stories. Much of his work dealt with racial themes and is said to have paved the way for many other African American writers in the fight against racism in the 1900s. One of Wright’s essays “The Living Ethics of Jim Crow” (1937), demonstrates the conditioning of African Americans through the acceptance of disenfranchisement and inferiority through a personal look in Richard Wright’s life. This conditioning is brought through childhood upbringings, the stigmas placed by society, and the internal acceptance of those stigmas through reoccurring experiences.

Although, white men no longer owned black men, they still held power over them. The Jim Crow Laws severely limited the freedoms of colored people and gave white people the right to persecute them for a variety of reasons. Wright, was raised in an extremely impoverished family and was often neglected attention as a young child because his mother was forced to provide for the family. This lack of guidance, isolated him from many aspects of society, one of which was the interaction with white people. Unfortunately for Wright, while he tried to understand the system, he was denied answers to his questions, “I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I could not quite understand it.” (Page ??). The Jim Crow system was based on colored people following the rules that white people had set, so questioning these rules was just as dangerous as not following them. This made is very difficult for Wright to learn how to interact with white people, yet as he got older and experienced the interactions between the two races he began to share the fear that kept white people in

"Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another." This passage written in Black Boy, the autobiography of Richard Wright shows the disadvantages of Black people in the 1930's. A man of many words, Richard Wrights is the father of the modern

The novel Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, tells the story of a white novelist from the south who seeks to write about the relationships between blacks and whites. He embarked on a personal mission in the late 1950's to experience the hatred and intolerance toward blacks that was widespread in the South. In order to see what life was truly like as a black man in the south, he proceeded to undergo medical treatments to alter his skin to a black pigment temporarily. No longer seen as a human being for other targets, he discovered how oppressed blacks were to a point of no hope. He walked the streets one night as a black man, despised and feared by whites but was respected by his black peers. When Griffin received news that a white jury denied a case of a black lynching, Griffin decided to go to the heart of south Mississippi to check it out. At the bus station, he acquired looks of hatred from the white passengers on the bench. Once on the bus, he and the other black passengers were forced to stay back while the whites departed at a rest stop. The discrimination from the bus driver forced the rest of the passengers to hold their bladders and knew that if an accident were to happen on the bus, it would just be another reason for white people to hold against them. In another incident, a racist teenager shoved him against a wall and mugged him while shouting out the N-word. He recalls that he was once hungry and the clerk refused to sell food to him based on the color of his

     Richard Wright's novel Black Boy is not only a story about one man's struggle to find freedom and intellectual happiness, it is a story about his discovery of language's inherent strengths and weaknesses. And the ways in which its power can separate one soul from another and one class from another. Throughout the novel, he moves from fear to respect, to abuse, to fear of language in a cycle of education which might be likened to a tumultuous love affair.

Black Boy is a denunciation of racism and his conservative, austere family. As a child growing up in the South, Richard Wright faced constant pressure to submit to white authority, as well as to his family’s violence. However, even from an early age, Richard had a spirit of rebellion. His refusal of punishments earned him harder beatings. Had he been weaker amidst the racist South, he would not have succeeded as a writer.