Wright

Wright

  • Submitted By: roselina
  • Date Submitted: 02/18/2009 8:24 PM
  • Category: Biographies
  • Words: 410
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 424

At the age of six, Richard has no consciousness of racial dissimilarities. He looked at everyone the same. However, his grandmother can be termed white only because that is her natural color, even still the distinctions remains invisible to him. He got involved in life on the streets, which leads him to become a drunkard, hanging around a saloon and begging for pennies from pedestrians. His mother beats him, and prays for his salvation. His mother chastises him, the God she chastises him with is a merciless oppressor, a kind of supernatural manifestation of white society. He has strict codes of conduct, demands instant obedience, and, when defied, gives instant punishment. Richard's mother, here uses God as another, more awesome term for white people in order to impress on her son the necessity to stay in his place. God becomes many things; to whatever Richard's mother is unable to cope with or explain in human terms, He is introduced as the solution.
When he witnesses his father bowing and scraping, being an Uncle Tom before a white judge in order to avoid feeding his family, he can see clearly what he himself might become. It is a repulsive image to him, as is the image of his father, laughing with his new woman, all sensuality and no love. Now, however, as a boy, Richard has no tolerance for such a man. His mother tries to protect him from seeing his condition for what it is. She wards off his questions about white people and succeeds in keeping their reality remote. But the results of this protection are to make white people fantastic and unreal in his imagination; even his relationship to other blacks is unrealistic. In two separate incidents, he sees blacks in uniform as soldiers and prisoners and he is terrified by the reality of the nightmare. They seem more like animals than people, and he wants to understand why they are what they are. His mother evades him, but lets him know vaguely that white people are somehow responsible. She does not tell her son...

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