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Essay on Black Boy

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In the book Black Boy, we see many black people in the south dealing with many hardships. One of the most prominent problems for blacks seemed to be the "Jim
Crow" laws. These laws withheld blacks from society, breaking them apart from whites and making it very hard for them to live an even close to normal life. Black people couldn't express their own ideas at all.
They had to call all white men "sirs" and all white women "ma'am". They couldn't act the slightest bit superior to whites. It was almost impossible for black people to make a decent living in the south, and they also had to take the abuse dealt to them by he whites without even attempting ant resistance. Blacks in the south also had to deal with the separation aspects of the …show more content…

Throughout the book we see these other people dealing with the problems of an extremely racist society. We also see how each person in Richards life deals with it differently. There are a few people and insience that stick out in my mind especially. The first one would have to be an incident with Shorty. Shorty has dealt with racism his whole life, and he has learned to deal with it as he has grown. We see a great example of how Shorty deals on page 269Shorty is faced with the problem of no money, such as many other southern blacks were, and we see that he is willing to do anything for any amount of money.

" You can kick me in the ass for a quarter" (269,wright) As this happens Richard witnesses the whole thing and we can see that he is very disappointed in the way Shorty dealt with the situation. He can't understand how he can put himself in that kind of degrading position, and Shorty simply answers.

" But a quarter can't pay for what he did to you!"

But we can see Shorty thinks differently.

Another example of a person that dealt differently with the Racism around him was Uncle Hoskins. He was

a man just trying to make his own in this world. Minding his own business, trying to run his own business

so he could support his family. We see that he owes some money to some white people, it seems to play a

part at the time of his killing, but if you look deeper you see that the most significannot reason for him being

lynched was

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