Richard Wright's Black Boy In English Class

When I was seven, my teacher succeeded in saving me. I was trapped in my own mind. Fearing judgment and the unfamiliar, I hid within the embrace of anxiety. I knew that anxiety was preventing me from acting like the rest of my classmates, however, I didn’t mind. I felt a sense of security within my world of limited knowledge and dangers. One day, my teacher handed me a stack of books from the library. They were various works of fiction, some of which were tales of dragons and wizards. I reluctantly picked one up, intimidated by the words on the pages, and began to read. At the time, I didn’t realize just how important those books would be. Recently, I read Richard Wright’s Black Boy in English class. Wright writes about his troubled upbringing
Wright writes that during prayer “I wrote of an Indian maiden, beautiful and reserved...I was excited; I read it over and saw that there was a yawning void in it...I decided to read it to a young woman who lived next door” (Wright 141). The act of writing during prayer demonstrates how Wright, although he may not have been aware of it, was rebelling against his grandmother’s wishes for him to become Christian. By deceiving his grandmother, who believed that he was earnestly trying to pray, Wright maintains power and control over his own beliefs and actions. This is further supported by how he was writing of an Indian woman, thus demonstrating his rejection of religion and refusal to submit to his grandmother. The neighbor, who Wright reads his story to, responds to his story with confusion and amazement. Her incomprehension empowers him because through his writing, he becomes inaccessible to her. This quote reveals that language has the potential to have power because it allows Wright to express himself through creativity. Writing is the means by which he is able to escape the oppression he faces in reality, finding comfort in a world that he can create and control with his
Prior to the twentieth century, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, had established the “separate but equal” doctrine. The Court ruled that both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment granted “‘absolute equality of the two races before the law,’ [however] such equality extended only so far as political and civil rights, not ‘social rights’” (McBride). The ruling of this case had legalized segregation, and as a result, the Jim Crow laws, which were a series of Southern state laws that enforced discrimination against African Americans, became a deeply rooted part of society. Wright’s account of the early twentieth century allows us, as readers in the twenty-first century, to better understand to what extent racial prejudices affected the individuality of African Americans. He writes that in the South, their role in society had restricted them from aspiring to higher political, social, and economic status. Moreover, he highlights the psychological consequences of racism. Members of the black community exercised severe self-restraint in front of white people for their own safety. Therefore, survival during the time period of Black Boy depended upon passivity and conformity to structural racism, ultimately living in a world of limited knowledge and