Racism Through A Little Boy S Essay

, Research Paper

Racism through a Little Boy s Eyes

Racism is a difficult topic to understand. Viewing racism through the eyes of a young boy named Richard Wright gives the reader the feeling of understanding the horrific life he grew up in. The style of Wright s first-person narrative generalizes his own experience to draw conclusion about the manner in which society functions. Richard Wright was unfolding the awareness and consciousness of race and of the relationship between blacks and whites by living through it first hand.

Beginning with the first chapter of Black Boy we start to encounter the first awareness Richard Wright has about blacks and whites. He is fearful of his mother s beatings, careful to avoid his father, and deathly afraid of his granny s white image (23). Richard Wright, at the age of four years, mimics what he sees in his environment; when Wright ties a make shift noose, he mimics the hanging of black men, an image prevalent during an era dominated by the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crows segregation laws. Wright portrays innocence in his everyday childhood by not expressing his feelings to others. Wright possesses a mischievous spirit and is not sure of how the world works. Richard hears through out the community that a white man beat a black boy, Richard becomes bewildered with confusion asking his mother why did the white man whip the black boy (24). Wright is still unaware of the social relationship between blacks and white. To me [whites] were merely people like other people, (23) he says. Little by little Richard is starting to become a conscious about what is happening.

A device that Richard Wright employs in Black Boy is dualism, specifically between black and white. There is a constant play of words off the notion of black and white. Richard s white-looking grandmother (23), the white man who beats the black boy (24), the white boat he dreams of (9), and the black-and-white zebras he spots (59). This dualism imagery is a reflection of the dualism that Wright experiences in society, between the black community and the white community.

When Wright leaves his grandmother s house, Richard s mom has left a sharp lasting impression of the relationship between whites and blacks by explaining what the black-and white zebras were. Uncle Hoskins owned a saloon that catered to blacks that worked in the sawmills. Uncle Hoskins always left to work in the white area neighborhood were the whites disliked him. One morning Uncle Hoskins fails to return home. At dinnertime, the family learned that white men who coveted his successful business shot Uncle Hoskins. Quickly, the family packs their clothes and dishes into a farmer s wagon, and without a funeral leave back to Granny s house. Richard experiences and feels racism first hand.

Richard Wright begins to understand more about the social relations between blacks and whites. But unlike his mother, his indifference feelings for the white community stems much deeper than racial injustice. A part of Wright s internalization of emotion causes him to place the anger he has built toward his parents and others into his anger towards whites. He describes how upon hearing rumors about racial beatings and murders he began to imagine men, against whom he was powerless, giving meaning to confused defensive feeling that had long been sleeping (74). White people begin to become symbolic of his general opposer, representing every fear and authority figure that had once intimated Richard Wright despite the fact that he himself had never been abused by whites.

In Chapter 3, Wright as a black boy is isolated from the world of the white people, but this isolation is felt within his own race as well. Within his black community he is never able to find confidents and does not allow himself to reveal his feelings to anyone. When he enters into the gang, he seems to find comrades among his fellow gang members, but their relationship is superficially based on their similar racial prejudice rather than friendship. The racial tension between blacks and whites is the only common factor that Wright seems to share with those he befriends.

Richard Wright on one occasion starts selling newspapers in his neighborhood to earn money. One day a family friend who regularly buys newspapers ask Wright if he knows what he is selling. The man sits Wright down, showing him the racist propaganda and the Ku Klux Klan articles in the paper. The old man said: Your re a black boy and you re trying to make a few pennies and then saying, If you sell em, your re just helping white people to kill you (131). Disgusted with his own ignorance, Wright throws his papers away and never sells them again, and also becoming more consciously aware of the racism that surrounds him.

Chapter 6, an integral part of Wright s maturation is learning how to interact with others including white people. Before his job, Richard has never really been informed about the relationship between whites and blacks. In his childhood, the value placed on one s race was learned second-hand, from his relatives, peers, and elders. When he takes his first job in the home of the white woman, Richard experiences first-hand the prejudice he has only heard or dreamed about. The woman had assaulted my ego; she had assumed that she knew my place in life, what I felt, what I ought to be, and I resented it with all my heart (147).