3. Black Boy, Richard Wright Black Boy, is both an indictment of American
racism and a narrative of the artist's development. As a child growing up in the
Jim Crow South, Richard faced constant pressure to submit to white authority.
However, even from an early age, Richard had a fierce spirit of rebellion. Had
he lacked the resilience to be different despite the pressure to conform to
social expectations, he would probably never have become an internationally
renowned writer.
The entire system of institutional racism was designed to prevent the
American black's development of aspirations beyond menial labor. Racist whites
were extremely hostile to black literacy and even more so to black Americans who
wanted to make writing a career. However, Richard did not only face opposition
to his dreams from racist whites. In many ways, his own family and the black
community fiercely opposed his aspirations. His grandmother, a strict,
illiterate Seventh Day Adventist, considered reading and writing about anything
other than God sinful. Richard's peers considered him silly and unrealistic and
maybe dangerous.
Throughout his childhood, Richard suffered violence at the hands of his
family for daring to rebel against his assigned role of humble silence. In Black
Boy, he often charges the black community with perpetuating the agenda of white
racism. Throughout his childhood and adulthood, Richard reacted with bitter
contempt toward what he saw as the submission of other black people to white
authority. Wright has often been criticized for failing to acknowledge or
appreciate the richness of the American black community.
However, his personal experiences clearly affected his relationship with it.
Just as he suffered abuse and hostility from his own family, so did he receive
little comfort from the larger black community. Wright constantly clashed with
what he saw as Black American submission, and, for personal reasons, clashed
with all religious dogmatism. The black community reacted to his rebellion in
kind, and Richard suffered intense isolation and loneliness during the formative
years of his life.
He did not understand until later that his family and the black community
discouraged his rebellion because pragmatic submission to the expectations of
racist whites was a means to ensure the collective survival of the community. A
rebellious act of one individual not only represented a threat to his or her
life but also to the lives of his or her family and the black community as a
whole.
This tension, between the need to conform for survival and the need to rebel
in order to achieve individual and community dreams, is one that animated
Wright's life and his autobiography. In the book, Richard lays bare the paranoia
and difficulty of being a black man in America, even the supposedly non-racist
America of the North. When he fled from the south to Chicago, Wright suddenly
entered a new environment: The culture was more tolerant, but lingering beneath
was a latent racism.
Richard found that the fear of uncertainty engendered by this racism, by the
constant subconscious knowledge that blacks in America were second class
citizens, could drive many American blacks to submit to white authority simply
because it offered the security of knowing what to expect. In the North, Richard
could sit next to white man on public transportation, and he could even accuse a
white co-worker of spitting in the food at a restaurant where he worked.
However, for a long while, Richard did not know how to act.
He, like many blacks, feared committing an offense that might lead to the
revocation of the meager rights they had finally achieved. Richard's search for
belonging eventually brought him to Communism. But just as Wright found
insufficient the dictates of the black community and of religion, he soon came
to find the paranoia, fear, pettiness, and dogmatism of the communist party to
be too much. He agreed with Communist political philosophy but not with its
practice. Wright's search for self, a theme that runs throughout his life of
rebellion
