Essay on Black Boy by Richard Wright

Richard is not eye-catching due to physical deformity which he vividly describes as the cause of his misfit, and therefore acquires himself the status of a victim. No one pays attention to him because others neither find him handsome nor sexually appealing. But he magnetizes the audience, makes them complicit of his own deeds and dares it to look away.

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.

The next form of hunger that Richard encountered was one for literature which seemed to give him a release from the suffocating reality of his surroundings. His appetite for literature became a defining characteristic as the novel progressed. Though her effort was short-lived, a boarder at his Grandma’s house, Ella, gave him his first taste of reading. “As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me…. My sense of life deepened…. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me” (Wright 39). In light of Richard’s continued pursuit for knowledge critic Dykema-VanderArk reflects that, “Richard's reading opens his eyes… ‘made the look of the world different’ and let him imagine his life under different circumstances. Richard eventually recognizes that the social system of the South strives to keep black Americans from just such ways of thinking.” His craving for literature sets him apart from most of the black community surrounding him.

In the story, Richard had mentioned about the loss of his identity, his speaks of language and his family. We can see that when he said, “I did not know that I had a family, a history, a culture, a source of spirituality, a cosmology, or a traditional way of living. I had no awareness that I belonged somewhere. I grew up ashamed of my Native identity and the fact that I knew nothing about it”. This shows he was angry that there was no one tell him about where he belonged and his culture.

Though Richard suffered abuse throughout his childhood without knowing why, he decided that he was going to change his attitude so he would never get in trouble again and change his future for the better. There are multiple incidents in the book where a member of Richard’s family has whipped him for actions he did that he did not fully understand, since he was still such a young child. Each time he was beaten he resented the person who beat him and was humiliated but as Richard got little older, he decided he wanted to change his actions that were causing his pain and embarrassment, and tried to please his family so he would never be beaten again. One night when Richard was only about seven or eight years old, his grandmother was giving him

The story Black Boy, written by Richard Wright, is a story about a boy’s struggle with himself and the world around him. A large part of this struggle comes from Richard’s loss of innocence as a young child. Throughout the story Richard shows he must be independent to continue living in his abstract life. Richard loss of innocence is shown consistently throughout the book and other articles relating to the book. Four different situations that portray this loss of innocence are as follows; separation of blacks and whites, burning a house down, killing a kitten, and the cruel experiences he had in his childhood.

African Americans live poorly with no opportunities. He claimed he did it because he has nothing to lose anymore. To him his life is as bad as it could get. He told me “I knew that if I were caught I would go to the chain gang. But was not my life already a kind of chain gang? What, really, did I have to lose?” However Richard had an error, what he doesn’t realize is that he not only could what his family worked for but he could also lose his family that mean so much to him. The wounds created to African Americans affect their way of

This experience was not unique to Wright, however; it was a reality felt by many blacks sharing his time and place. Wright was growing up in the Jim Crow era in the South, when, despite the North having won the Civil War, blacks had been successfully segregated by law and custom in “practically every conceivable situation in which whites and blacks might come into social contact”. This was a time when signs dictating where blacks could and could not walk, eat, live, and enter were everywhere, impacting the daily lives of black Americans and shaping their mannerisms to a huge degree. Wealth, skill, and personality did not matter; if one’s skin was black, one was subject to these laws and customs. Thus, skin color at this time was the most significant defining feature among Southern individuals with or without their consent, and by using the term “Black Boy” in his title, Wright drew attention to and challenged this unjust reality of race relations during his early years.

     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.

keep your mouth shut or the white folks Ôll get you too." As a teenager Wright

This essay will talk about how Richard in Black Boy was living a life of alienation, created by his oppressors the white man and how the white man's power was able to make the black community oppress itself.

The book Black Boy by Richard Wright is an autobiography set in the Deep South in the early 1900’s. The book starts with Richard being four years old and very mischievous. One day he is playing with fire and accidentally lights the curtains on fire. The house is suddenly in flames and Richard runs out to hide under the burning house. Luckily, his stepfather runs out and finds him before the house collapses.

Richard wants power, and he wants war and death alike. That is what the speech tells the audience, and when reading the speech aloud, it is very easily noted the amount of rage and jealousy that is laced through every word. Though Richard says that they are in a current time of peace, he feels none. He wants no part in the tranquility that has been brought to the land since the end of the War. What the man wants is conflict instead—going as far as insulting death and war itself. Richard personifies war, saying that it has gone and joined in the festivities of the day and has found love. In that instant, Richard is jealous of it, for he says that love will not find him because he is ‘deformed.’

(P67) Here Richard realizes there is still hope, that he is not completely invisible to the world. Another point is that normal people can be hated and both London below and regular London. For example “He put his dagger away, in the furs of his robe. Then he smiled at Richard with yellow teeth.

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.