The Culture Of The South In Richard Wright's Black Boy

Richard Nathaniel Wright was an author, poet, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. He was born in Mississippi on September 4, 1908 to Nathan and Ella Wright. Wright’s father was a sharecropper, who abandoned his family responsibilities when his son was five years old. Wright learned as an early age the struggles of being an African American in the south, “a time when the American South was in its darkest age of racial segregation” (545). His short story “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, an Autobiographical Sketch”, is a biography of the way Wright lived as an African American. The short story depicts the humiliation, inhumane treatment, and violence against blacks as seen through his eyes. The struggle to be treated fairly during this era was

The text throws light on the neediness and the starvation as experienced by the black characters that are monetarily disempowered by the afflictions of racial segregation. The black population is deprived the right for equivalent work prospects. Since they do not earn a decent wage, they don’t have the minimum amount of luxury in their lives. They are deprived of homes, food and other essential necessities. The effect of racial discrimination discloses on Wright in the guise of starvation. As a child, Richard could not grasp the concept of racism. But when he grows up, he acknowledges why he and his sibling need to feast upon the leftover sustenance of the white individuals.

In Robert Lake’s essay, “An Indian Father’s Plea” his son Windwolf is having difficulty with racism in his school. It is not only children who are racist towards him it is the adults as well. “On the first day of class, you had difficulty with his name. You wanted to call him Wind insisting that wolf somehow must be his middle name.” (Lake 77). This is showing some racism in the teacher because, any other teacher would’ve worked harder to learn his name but, she didn’t. “He said that he doesn’t have any friends at school because they make fun of his long hair.” (Lake 78). These kids are the kids that he is going to be growing up with for many years, so, with them bullying him at such a young age they’re going to grow up bullying him. Now that Windwolf has experienced this at such a young age with people that he sees everyday he is going to grow up thinking that everyone he meets will be racist towards him.

What does it mean to be a writer? Who or what defines a writer? Is it up to the critics, the readers, or the author’s original intentions? For Richard Wright and James Baldwin, their own authorial intentions define their work. Baldwin identified with Wright through his literature as he was growing up. He admired Wright’s work and saw him as a literary idol. When the two authors met in Brooklyn, Baldwin was just twenty-years old, and Wright was thirty-six. As they developed a friendship, they discovered that their ideas and intentions for literature were vastly different from one another. This sparked a feud between the two authors. Richard Wright felt that literature should be powerful and political. His goal as an author was to make his make his readers more conscious and aware of the social climate. For James Baldwin, he felt that literature should be an artistic creation, not used for a political agenda. Although

Brain controls all of the organs in our body and what makes human different from animals is that we have the ability to think and have our own thoughts. Everything is possible in reality and what makes it possible is our knowledge. Richard Wright, who explains the definition of the word cognitive the best by using his memoir the ‘Black Boy’. In his memoir Richard explains his struggles of life as a child, teen and adult. But eventually succeed using his knowledge and experience. In Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Richard’s cognitive need meets and continuous to achieve his dream by unit people together and taught them how to be a good human being through his writing.

Native Son is a book that depicts violent racial tension between blacks and whites during the 1930s. This eye-opening novel is written by Richard Wright. It centers around the life of a young, black man named Bigger Thomas. The story is composed of crimes committed by Bigger and the motives behind them. His motives are influenced by his thoughts, which result from the social pressure he experiences as an African American. The chain reaction resulting from the American culture of the 1930s is what Wright is trying to exploit. Wright uses Bigger’s story to represent the product of this cultural hardship. Insight on Bigger’s thoughts and actions allow us to see how these social prejudices influence the life of African Americans. Wright’s main goal was to emphasize on the psychological effect racism had on African Americans. Wright intentionally did not represent Bigger as a hero. In fact, Bigger represents the result of this racial conflict. In an ironic twist, Bigger becomes a violent figure that the whites were afraid of; hence, why they were racist. In other words, he is what the whites were preventing by being racist. Figuratively speaking, Native Son most certainly means “the product of American culture,” which goes back to how this traditional, racist american culture in the 1930s raised the violent attitude of African Americans like Bigger.

In Black Boy, Richard Wright leads a difficult life, yet he is able to persevere through it. Richard has an independent personality that protects him from getting betrayed, but his stubbornness causes him trouble to adapt to a better life. His superior intelligence gives him an advantage over others and makes him think about the future more than others, but they mistreat him for it. Because of his high intelligence, he shares a different moral of equality that makes him stand alone against the whites. The unique personality and beliefs of Richard Wright, like his stubbornness to change, lead to a life of isolation that caused his actions to deviate towards conflict pushing others away.

“I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what we said and what we left unsaid” (Wright 181). Richard uses his observation of whites to guide himself on how to act and react around white people. For example he must agree with the whites even if he truly disagrees. For example he must agree with the whites even if he truly disagrees. “I answered with false heartiness, falling quickly into that nigger-being-a-good-natured-boy-in-the- presence-of-a-white-man pattern, a pattern into which I could now slide easily” (Wright 234). This pattern helped Richard learn how to behave in front of whites even if it meant he had to be someone he is not. Even though Richard hates being someone he is not, he must to maintain his job and get by in the south. Richard is getting better and better at being around whites but in order to do that he has to do thing he

To begin, Richard Wright’s Black Boy portrays society and class in numerous subjects. Violence, racism, and discrimination are some of the many ways society and class was demonstrated in the novel. When he was little, Richard has faced terrors a young child should never interfere with. As he grew up, however, Richard began to get involved in vicious fights. During Chapter 12, white employees instigated a fight between Richard and Harrison, a former black employee at another company. The white employees kept telling each man that the other is plotting to kill him. At this point in the story, Richard and Harrison were investigating whether or not the rumors are true. However, both

The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23). Wright’s critique of racism in America includes a critique of the black community itself—specifically the black folk community that is unable or unwilling to educate him properly or accept his individual personality and

This can be seen in experiences within the memoir where affluent whites use derogatory terms such as “white trash” to describe the impoverished whites in the community (Carter, 20). Carter’s accounts of discrimination, which were strengthened by the inclusion of colloquialism, towards whites and blacks in his town lead the audience to the thought that discrimination and racism are learned actions by individuals in a society in order to maintain class distinctions. All in all, Carter’s recollection of various discriminatory events is effective in creating a tone of disapproval, which he uses to show his scorn for racism.

The Harlem Renaissance was a development period that took place in Harlem, New York. The Renaissance lasted from 1910 to about the mid-1930s, this period is considered a golden age in African American culture. This Renaissance brought about masterful pieces of music, literature, art, and stage performance. The Harlem Renaissance brought about many prominent black writers such as Richard Wright. Richard Wright is a highly acclaimed writer, who stressed the importance of reading, writing, and words. Wright is best known for a lot of exceptional pieces of literature such as “Blueprint for Negro Writing” which is somewhat of a declaration of independence from Harlem Renaissance writers.

The scholars I have used so far to talk about Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dilbeck and Ashmawi, bring up good points about Janie’s characterization as well as about her husbands’ characterizations (particularly Tea Cake’s). They particularly focus on the role of gender in the novel, but they do not really bring up how race is depicted in Hurston’s book. Julie Roemer does, however, in her article titled “Celebrating the Black Female Self: Zora Neale Hurston 's American Classic”. She explains that race is something that characters in the Hurston’s novel consider when have opinions on something. I have brought up earlier in this paper that Tea Cake beats Janie at one point. Tea Cake does this because he is mad with jealousy that Janie

brainwashed into being fearful that if they do not comply to the systematic set of rules they’d be killed, beat and that’s where some physical violence can play a big role.

In the autobiography “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, Richard learns that racism is prevalent not only in his Southern community, and he now becomes “unsure of the entire world” when he realizes he “had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature” by delivering a Klan newspaper. He is now aware of the fact that even though “Negroes were fleeing by the thousands” to Chicago and the rest of the North, life there was no better and African Americans were not treated as equals to whites. This incident is meaningful both in the context of his own life story and in the context of broader African American culture as well. At the most basic level, it reveals Richard’s naïveté in his belief that racism could never flourish in the North. When