Racial Discrimination In Richard Wright's Native Son

Richard Wright made a film adaptation called “Native Son”, speaking on a time frame where segregation was still present in 1940’s of Chicago, a man was accused of murder. This film took a quick wrong turn when something unpredictable happened causing conflicting views. In addition to this racism played a great deal in his crime to be found guilty. In addition to this racism played a great deal in his crime to be found guilty. The purpose of this essay to examine Richard Wright's film adaptation of ‘Native Son’ and his innocent crime in regards to racism, violence, and poverty, to discuss view of points of whether he is guilty or innocent.

Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, to a poor family on a plantation in Mississippi. His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother was a well-educated teacher. Due to his family’s poverty they were forced to move to Memphis. When Wright was five years old, his father left his family for another woman, and his mother was forced to leave her job as a school teacher and do domestic work to provide for her family. As Wright grew up, he became involved with the Communist Party, and in 1940 he published Native Son. This success of Wright’s book made the black community proud of him, but it also brought a lot of uncomfortable feelings. They felt that the main character, Bigger, portrayed a stereotypical, harsh, black man the

The novel Native Son by Richard Wright tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living on the South Side of Chicago. Due to the severe oppression and racism he has faced throughout his entire life, the reader is shown how Bigger has no control over his life and is driven to extreme actions as a result of his fear and anger. Wright displays how media and popular culture in the novel serve as powerful driving forces in emphasizing the destructive racial prejudices that are present in society as a way to solidify these ideas in the minds of its members. Through presenting the media in such a light, Wright criticizes how the media inaccurately presents information to the public

In 1920, Oscar Micheaux directed the silent film Within Our Gates which conducts an in-depth examination of race relations and discrimination within the United States. One of the outcomes of the film is a blatant failure of justice resulting in the lynching of an African American couple, The Landrys. Seemingly, time has not altered the inherent absence of justice concerning the treatment of Black men and women in situations where criminal activity is suspected, legitimately or otherwise. Evidence is found with the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and many other Black victims who died at the hands of police who are tasked with upholding justice and fail to do so. However, what was the popular sentiment toward failure within the legal system between 1920 and 2015? While not representative of this entire time span, in 1962, Robert Mulligan’s film To Kill a Mockingbird focuses on race relations and an African American male wrongly accused of rape who is ultimately killed in a suspicious police shooting. Within Our Gates and To Kill a Mockingbird each offer a presentation of a gross miscarriage of justice that is obvious to the omniscient viewer, but the reaction the films garner from the audience varies from outrage to resignation due to the implementation (or lack thereof) of a visual stimuli, telling of the time period in which the films were produced.

In his most famous novel, Native Son, Richard Wright's female characters exist not as self-sufficient, but only in relation to the male figures of authority that surround them, such as their boyfriends, husbands, sons, fathers, and Bigger Thomas, the protagonists. Wright presents the women in Native Son as meaningless without a male counterpart, in which the women can not function as an independent character on their own. Although Wright depicts clearly the oppression of Blacks, he appears unconscious of creating female characters who regardless of race, are exploited and suppressed. Their sole purpose in the novel is to further the story by putting Bigger in new and more dangerous situations by

While the media might not directly contribute to discrimination, the media is undoubtedly a significant aspect of modern day society that influences how people think about racial issues (Royce, 2009, p. 1, 17). Many people claim that racism no longer exists; however, the minorities’ struggle with injustice is ubiquitous. Whites are attempting to keep blacks and other minority families locked into an impoverished political and economic position by using various tactics to isolate them, such as mass incarceration that stems from the War on Drugs. The New Jim Crow helps us in seeing how history is repeating itself and how to legalized discrimination among the blacks and Hispanics by implementing the mass incarceration.

In Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, the overall issue was with the main character, Bigger Thomas, being accused of raping Mary. The film tells the story of the main character Bigger Thomas, a 20-year old African American man who is growing up in poverty on the Southside of Chicago. Native Son displays a series of events and decisions made by Bigger that will alter his life. The purpose of this essay to examine Richard Wright’s film adaptation of Native Son, and to argue that Bigger Thomas proves to be guilty of murder due to being present with the victim, him covering up the crime, and his history of violence.

The story of Native Son by Richard Wright is one of the greatest pieces of literature which functioned as a massive wake-up call for the American public. According to Irving Howe, when "[t]he day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever." Native Son was written at a time when blacks were stereotyped as brutal and uncivilized. Wright depicts his community’s suffering, poverty and denial of rightful recognition in his works. Wright’s Native Son not only represents history with sociopolitical factors, but also has excellent literary value.

One of the many instinctual desires that humans are born with is the desire to surround themselves with other humans. This innate idea, like eating or drinking, is something that the human body is dependent on. Without interaction and socialization, humans would go insane, stuck within their own thoughts. In Richard Wright’s Native Son, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Stephen King’s On Writing, this desire for human companionship influences the lives of all protagonists. Without this humanly comfort, no creature would able to survive.

  In Native Son, Wright employs Naturalistic ideology and imagery, creating the character of Bigger Thomas, who seems to be composed of a mass of disruptive emotions rather than a rational mind joined by a soul. This concept introduces the possibility that racism is not the only message of the novel, that perhaps every person would feel as isolated and alone as Bigger does were he trapped in such a vicious cycle of violence and oppression. Bigger strives to find a place for himself, but the blindness he encounters in those around him and the bleak harshness of the Naturalistic society that Wright presents the reader with close him out as effectively as if they had shut a door in his

In the novel Native Son, Wright constantly demonstrates that restrained fear, stemming from racism and oppression, can boldly manifest itself through uncontrollable actions. Throughout the plot, Wright focuses on Bigger’s fear to act in a dominant white community which had continually restricted him and his ambitions. Due to the racially segregated Chicago that surrounded him, Bigger was afraid to live his life for fear that he would further be limited by the white society. Therefore, in moments of interaction with them, Bigger’s consciousness quickly becomes disabled, restraining only so much of his fear until it externalizes into bold actions that allow him to live, but in the worst ways possible. Bigger first shows his fear when he and a group of friends conspire on robbing the store of a white man.

Set in the 1930s, Native Son chronicles the life of Bigger Thomas, a black man, who becomes a victim of society as a result of a series of crimes that erode at his genuine identity. The contrasts between Bigger’s life and that of the Dalton’s is used as a representation of a broken nation. Richard Wright’s Native Son heavily relies on stereotypes to exemplify how societal views, those considered the “norm”, psychologically affect a person.

The main point Wright focuses on in Native Son is that oppression creates psychological damage. This oppression alienates and limits African Americans in every aspect of their life, robbing them of a self-identity. This pushes them to resort to violence and defiance to feel like an individual who has purpose. This not only affects Bigger, but the entire black race. Ultimately, the racism of Whites stereotyped, limited, and alienated an entire race for centuries until individuals, like Bigger Thomas of South Side Chicago, removed their blindness and allowed them to see the irreversible damage they had

There were many concepts that attributed to shaping the African American oppression but the three main concepts were race, class, and gender. The Native Son is a great example of that. The novel takes place during the 1930s a time in which African Americans “face squarely and honestly the most profound consequences of more than two centuries of the enslavement and segregation of blacks in North America.” And in Chicago the most segregated city. Bigger Thomas one of the main characters in The Native Son, experiences the daily effects of racism and the effects of coming from the poorest class. Bigger has no “pretense to a sophisticated education, to anything more than rudimentary reading, or to ideals.” Bigger was a black young men whose gender

The Native Son by Richard Wright took place in Chicago, Illinois during the nineteen-thirties. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a twenty year old African American boy who hates white supremacy and racism. He is involved with gangs and is constantly disappointing his family. Since Mr. Thomas (Bigger’s father) died, Bigger’s family has lost everything. The family of four lives in a tiny rat infested apartment, and has barely enough money to survive. Bigger’s mother wants Bigger to get a job as a chauffeur. Bigger, on the other hand, has other ideas. Bigger Thomas his friends, Gus, G. H., and Jack, were going to meet before they went out to go rob a store, but this robbery wasn’t going to be like any other robbery that they have done before.