The Minority Perspective In Richard Wright's Black Boy

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

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.

Desires of all types plague the human mind constantly. Certain desires are obvious and necessary, such as food and water. Others are more unique to humanity, such as education, respect, and love. When something or someone seems to stand in the way of an important yearning, desire becomes hunger. Over the course of world history, minorities have been repeatedly denied some of their most basic desires. An example would be the treatment of African-Americans in the United States until the later twentieth century. In Black Boy, Richard Wright characterizes his own multi-faceted hunger that drove his life in rebellion throughout the novel.

Brian Copeland was celebrating his 35th birthday with his friends in a pub. He went to the restroom to take a leak, and then he unexpectedly heard a couple of men talking about him and his accomplishments, but even though Copeland made a name for himself, these guys still see him as a “nigger.”

“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.

Wright would examine racial profiling if he was to write Black Boy today. Racial profiling is a very serious issue in the society today. Many African American were being target, and in some case murdered by law enforcement official because of their race. On August 9, 2014, a white police officer named Darren Wilson shoot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown multiple time in Ferguson, Mo. According to news article “From Ferguson to Charleston and Beyond, Anguish about Race Keep Building”, Even though there was a video tape showing that the black teenager was unarmed, the county grand jury still decided not to indict the police office because they believed the old assumption that African Americans are more likely to be criminals. “Grand juries have tended to give the benefit of the doubt to police officers. National polls revealed deep divisions in how whites and blacks viewed the facts in each case. Whites were more likely to believe officers’ accounts justifying the use of force. Blacks tended to see deeper forces at work: longstanding police bias against black men and a presumption that they are criminals”.

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.

Imagine a situation where one is walking down an empty street and a woman gives one a glance and begins running, or one is told to leave a public restaurant simply because of the family one was born into. This is the reality for two African-American authors in the 20th century. Over the history of the United States minorities have faced a numerous amounts of racism. The types of racism that was expressed to these minorities has evolved as time went on. Two authors decided to write about their experiences and they occurrences vary vastly. The details that really set one essay apart from the other include the time of day the racism took place, time period of the occurrence, and type of racism witnessed.

Wright had a very troublesome childhood, but it also impacted the way he viewed the world around him. When he was young, Richard’s father deserted their family, and his mother had a sickness that continuously got worse. He was also forced to become independent from his grandmother as a child because she disagreed with his hobbies (Wright, Richard). Wright’s younger years caused a disruption in his home and his education. Richard Wright grew up in the

My attempt to comprehend the guiltless letters smothering the lifeless tree in my hands was of interruption as the bus flew over another speed bump. The predestined occurrence led to a sigh, Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, no longer in my hands, and the bus driver silently cursing under their breath once the rear end of the yellow mobile and a mailbox kissed. Contemplations about the book clouded my thoughts, but my hand didn’t have the audacity to pick up the autobiography and bring it to my eyes once more. Alternatively, I peered out of a dirty window and questioned the horrors previously read about Richard Wright’s childhood. ‘What exactly were his intentions?’, ‘Why were so many rhetorical devices used?’, and ‘When will racism

Black Boy, which was written by Richard Wright, is an autobiography of his upbringing and of all of the trouble he encountered while growing up. Black Boy is full of drama that will sometimes make the reader laugh and other times make the reader cry. Black Boy is most known for its appeals to emotions, which will keep the reader on the edge of his/her seat. In Black Boy Richard talks about his social acceptance and identity and how it affected him. In Black Boy, Richard’s diction showed his social acceptance and his imagery showed his identity.

     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

   In the early twentieth century black American writers started employing modernist ways of argumentation to come up with possible answers to the race question. Two of the most outstanding figures of them on both, the literary and the political level, were Richard Wright, the "most important voice in black American literature for the first half of the twentieth century" (Norton, 548) and his contemporary Ralph Ellison, "one of the most footnoted writers in American literary history" (Norton, 700). In this paper I want to compare Wright's autobiography "Black Boy" with Ellison's novel "Invisible Man" and, in doing so, assess the effectiveness of their conclusions.

Have you ever been exposed to true hunger? The kinds of hunger that Richard was faced with in Black Boy does not show in the society and or generation where you and I live in. Middle-class citizens cannot really relate to real physical hunger. Hunger for us is when there is nothing we want to eat around the house and so we just don’t eat or we go out and buy quick foods. This isn't anywhere near to the days that Richard went without food. Physical hunger, however, is not the only hunger that shows up in Richard's life. Richard suffers from emotional and educational hunger as well. He wants more of a connection with others and simple books to read. Both of those are things that a lot of people take for granted. This productive autobiography, Black Boy, by Richard Wright displays what it is like to want such simple stuff .