Native Sonby Richard Wright

Richard Wright

• Born in 1908 (Mississippi)• Grew up on same plantation that his grandparents had worked

on as chattel• Abandoned by illiterate father• Mother was in ill health• Separated from brother and spent time in “orphan home”• Escaped and lived with grandmother – hunger, beats him

Jim Crow Laws

• 1890 – “Separate but Equal” – Plessy vs. Ferguson• Named after a show in which a white minstrel “blacked up”• Established after Civil War & the Reconstruction that followed

• “Whites Only” “For Colored Passengers” • Left blacks without any qualifications• Menial/Underpaid labor• Libraries = Whites only

Wright Moves to Chicago

• Menial and underpaid labor• Moved north in 1927

• No Jim Crow signs, but a clear color line• North is implicitly racist (De facto segregation)• Wright knew he had to speak meekly in monosyllables with

deliberate stupidity• Racism was endemic to America overall

• Acute overcrowding, disease, many other problems

Chicago

Improvements• Library access• Blacks pooled time, money, resources• Concentration of resources led to black-run

organizations, new charities, newspapers, magazines, banks, sporting clubs

Wright discovers Marxism

• Became a member in 1934 – actively wrote to promote revolutionary feelings in Chicago’s working class

• Explained systems and histories that generated terrible upbringings

• Ghetto = capitalism’s offspring• Sign of its addiction to underpaid labor / dependence on inequality

• Made Wright feel a sense of belonging• Mainly agreed with untenable cruelties of capitalism• Homogenized, deindividualized, controlled

• Eventually separated because he was unsatisfied with their commitment to combating racism and inequality

Richard Wright - Author

• Exposed intellectual dishonesty of racism • Small acts of intimidation/discrimination secretly

acknowledge potential for black equality

• Wrote Twelve Million Black Voices (1941),

Black Boy (1945)

Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)• Wealthiest black author of his time

What are we reading?

• Main character: Bigger (Antihero)• POV: Third person limited• Setting: Chicago – 1930s• Plot: A black man is justly accused of murder, but his

actions are so shaped by cultural, social, and economic forces that his actions were out of his control.

• Published: 1940 (Modernist)

Criticisms

• Feminist Readings• No strong female characters• Strips women of wit and courage and replaces it with

violence• Rape, dismemberment, death• Violence perpetrates on female body

• “Female characters are flat, one-dimensional characters, portrayed primarily in terms of their relationships to the male characters…”

Native Son

Can literature fight injustice?

• Social commentary on• “guilt-hate-fear complex” – Robert Guthrie• Whites = unaware of deep-seated racial prejudices• Blacks = unable to express themselves with

words/economical power use physical power in an effort to avoid confronting fear that leads to violence

• Both groups see each other as frightening and untrustworthy

Conversations

• Go to• http://today.io/152g4

• Use your first name and last initial• Ex: Sarah C

Unwanted Common Black Culture

“the Negro people did not ask for [their cultural nationalism], and deep down, though they express themselves through their institutions and adhere to this special way of life, they do not want it now. This special existence was forced upon them from without by lynch rope, bayonet and mob rule.”

Wright believed cultural nationalism kept racism alive.

Do you agree? Disagree? How do we solve the problem?

Is this present today?

What do you do when you feel powerless?

Are people a product of their environment?