Who Is Richard Wright's Black Boy: A Victim Of Racism?

Black Boy Essay The world has always endured hunger, but not always the conventional hunger that we are all familiar with. “Why could I not eat when I was hungry” (Wright pg.19) Although this statement regards his physical hungers, Wright also expresses his other hungers throughout his life. In “Black Boy” Richard Wright grows up in the Jim Crow South where he experiences a hunger for emotional expression and connection as well as the hunger for knowledge. Ever since Wright's childhood, he has longed for connection with others, to end this isolation.

It was on “...the last of September that I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the south,” says James Weldon Johnson’s ex-coloured man (Johnson 51). As a young boy, the ex-coloured man was raised by his mother as a talented white pianist in the North. It wasn’t until his later school days that he was faced with the realization that he was biracial. From then on, the ex-coloured man pondered his identity and traveled back and forth from North to South, symbolizing his inner conflict with what color he identified with. The ex-coloured man’s impulsive and frequent moving habits supports the claim that he was unsure what culture he belonged to.

Richard Wright left Chicago for New York and brought with him the belief system that had turned into a supplement to his identity as a black man and as an author. His advantage now lay in refining from the Garveyist and Black Nationalist developments a program for black solidarity that was guided by the standards and goals of communism. It was considering these worries that he set himself to write Native Son . Native Son delineates a period and place in which the possibility of a significant socialist presence in American politics was genuine. The moment was brief yet its outcomes characterized the eventual fate of the development for racial uniformity in the U.S.

In Black Boy, an autobiography written by Richard Wright, Wright describes himself growing up as a young African American boy growing up in the South in the 1940’s. While growing up, Richard experienced a lot of racism, beating and the Jim Crow Laws. This may not seem difficult to grow up with, but as an African American, it was hard. Many would treat Richard differently and Richard did not have the same opportunities that the White Americans had. But looking at the world today, opportunites have a come a long way.

The overall theme for the book “Black Boy” is you work hard enough you can become anything despite your physical appearance, for instance in Richard's case it was his race. The motif “hunger” ties back with the theme because in RIchard's case even though he was dirt poor he still worked hard to get whatever money he could earn and feed himself and his family. So Richard worked hard to earn money even though his race didn’t make it easy to. The motif “violence also ties back to the theme because violence was a big part of Richard's childhood. Again, although Richard faced violence, discrimination, ect.

From a very young age and most of his life, Richard Wright had suffered from hunger. Because hunger was normal for Richard, he could not even think about eating food everyday. Richard has experienced several different stages of hunger. In Richard Wright's novel Black Boy, Richard suffers from physical, emotional, and mental hunger. Richard Wright had suffered from physical hunger throughout his life.

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.

From the time when he was almost abused to death by his mother and father at the age of four, to his young adult life where he was verbally and physically tormented by his white counterparts, Richard Wright fought through life, struggle by violent struggle. As an African American living in the South, struggle is a day to day battle. For Richard, one of the struggles is violence, and being that he was born and raised in the South, he doesn't know anything different. Violence, whether it be verbal or physical, is something that many southern African Americans faced. This struggle debilitated Richard throughout his adolescence, and it poisoned his views of white people, religion, and the South.

“You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” For Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, this just meant imaging how someone else sees the world. John Howard Griffin, on the other hand, took a more literal approach; in order to understand the degree of prejudice the black community faces, he dyed his white skin black. He then took a plunge into the deep South — the most segregated part of the country. He didn’t change anything else about him — he kept his name, experience, dialect, history and personality — to find out the truth about the racism the other half deals with simply because of the color of their skin.

Although both Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” tell the tale of a black or not so black man facing the turmoil of segregation. There is a very distinct difference in both tales. Most notably, both men have very different living conditions and take contrasting approaches towards life. James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” takes a very different approach on the entirety of the white or black, segregation issue that so many books have done well. Instead of telling the tale of a struggling black male, fighting to keep a job, moving from home to home as in Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”, but instead tells the side of a “white man”.