Richard Wright's Black Boy

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.

Richard is sent to his Uncle Clark's, but he is unhappy there and insists on

Black Boy by Richard Wright is a memoir telling the life of the Richard Wright from childhood to adulthood. The book is separated with two sections, “Southern Night” and “The Horror and the Glory”. The first section tells Wright’s childhood while the second section is based on Wright’s early years in Chicago as a young adult. In the first chapter of the book, the four-year-old Wright is at his grandmother’s house warming his hands at the fireplace, while his sick grandmother lay on the bed. Richard starts playing with the fire and he ends up burning down his family house in Natchez, Mississippi (Wright 6-8).

"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

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.

Hunger is powerful feeling that all people endure sometime in their life. Whether it is literal or metaphoric hunger, it is an inevitable sensation that occurs in varying degrees in one’s life. In the book Black Boy, the narrator, Richard Wright experiences both literal hunger and a hunger to understand racism. The first type of hunger Wright experiences is literal and is quite common throughout the beginning of his life.

In Black Boy written by Richard Wright , it is an autobiography of some of the harsh experiences Richard faces growing up before and during the great depression. Richard constantly struggles to find a job and provide for his family, which always seems to be moving. When people shift environments it causes there morals and beliefs to shift as. When they live in different places societies standards are different which changes someone's morals, beliefs, and how the view things.

From an early age Richard Wright was aware of two races, the black and the white.

Each and every person on this Earth today has an identity. Over the years, each individual creates their identity through past experiences, family, race, and many other factors. Race, which continues to cause problems in today’s world, places individuals into certain categories. Based on their race, people are designated to be part of a larger, or group identity instead of being viewed as a person with a unique identity. Throughout Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Richard is on a search for his true identity. Throughout Black Boy, one can see that Richard’s racial background assigns him with a certain identity or a certain way in which some

“What is a rebel? A man who says no.” (Albert Camus, The Rebel) Black Boy is more than a mere autobiography, dealing with a man during the time of Jim Crow laws. Indeed, though the book is generally advertised as such, the greater theme here is not of the black man versus the white; it is of Richard’s fight against adversity, and the prevalent and constraining attitudes of not just his time, or the “White South”, but of the attitude of conformity throughout all time. Richard develops from birth to become a nonconformist; a rebel, and we can see this attitude throughout his whole life. As a child, he refuses to simply follow orders if they make no sense to him; for this, he is lashed repeatedly. As he grows older, he begins

Since Richard exited his mother’s womb, he had to undergo bigotry and unseen detestation from white southerners because of his color (Hart 35). Starting his first day of life on September 4, 1908, Richard Wright overcame several impediments and later became one of the first famous African-American authors. The Wright family lived in Natchez, Mississippi, and his parents worked, during his toddler years. Nathaniel Wright, Richard’s father, was a sharecropper. He labored for the rich plantation owners, while Richard’s mother was a school teacher. (Shuman 1697)Because of the constant beatings, Wright was obedient to all types of authority but anxiety and distrust formed in his mind. Richard unintentionally set his grandparents’ house

Throughout the book, Richard shows ignorance when it comes to race issues. He often doesn't know how to respond or act when he is being harassed about his race. This ignorance comes from his family refusing to tell him about what was happening in the world when he was a child. At one point, his mother even slapped him for asking about why there was segregation and about why his grandmother is “white” (46-48). These events and actions in his youth would lead to him being ignorant of these issues in his adulthood, which would lead to Richard being isolated from both the black and the white communities. First, one example of his separation from the black community is when Richard refuses to steal from white people. “More than once I had been called a ‘dumb nigger’ by black boys who discovered that I had not availed myself of a chance to snatch some petty piece of white property that had been carelessly left within my reach”(199). The other boys call Richard out because he refuses to steal. He does this because he was raised not to steal from white people while the other boys were raised to take advantage of their position in life and use it to their advantage. This gap between knowledge of how one should act leads to Richard being isolated from the other boys and others in the black community. Likewise, Richard ignorance of race issues leads to a rift between him and the white community.

Richard Wright, an African American writer who wrote about the race relations in the United States, left the country to escape its prejudiced ways. Leaving America, Richard Wright went to Paris and lived the rest of his life as an emigrant. Justly, his reasons for fleeing his former home were certainly understandable because of the way he, like every African American during the time, was mistreated. While a multitude of people feel that is wrong to abandon one’s own country, for many like Richard, it is the only reasonable and often the easiest option to achieve success and happiness. One may ask, what is an acceptable reason to permanently leave one’s own country and what circumstance would that person leave for? That specific reason relies on the varied opinions and experiences of an individual. For myself, there are countless reasons that would push me to permanently leave the country. The major reason that I would leave for another country is if I was being suppressed or discriminated against because of my race, sex, religion, and/or sexuality, or if I wanted to go and follow my dreams but was being held back because of the country I live in.

Wright has exposed the human predicaments of his individualism through his characters with their sufferings that they underwent due to their color, as well as he exposed the reality by bringing out the hidden pain of the blacks. The effects of alienation in a society can be noted through the novels of Wright such as, Black Boy and Native Son. In the novel Black Boy, Richard Wright had a constant feeling of alienation. Richard expresses his physical or emotional hunger, his disagreements with injustice, or his unwillingness to conform, he always felt this way. Racism plays a strong role in Wright’s Black Boy, due to the fact that this thought was very popular in this time period. Richard struggled to liberate himself from the alienation of white people and the working system because it was strongly looked down upon by whites and

History has many witnesses, with each witness comes a story, and each story provides the author’s own perspective. A plethora of authors have shared their views on the topic of race, such as Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and William Shakespeare in Othello, but all lack one important aspect: the minority perspective; which Richard Wright gives in full in his autobiography Black Boy. The authors fail to capture the minority perspective in the way Black Boy does because their protagonists aren’t subject to inescapable persecution, require the authorization of another person, or held fully accountable for their transgressions.