The Problem Of Racism In The Novel "Native Son"
After reading the novel Native Son there were somethings in the novel that were kind of offensive to the African American race by portraying blacks in a negative way. In the novel I could tell that Wright figured that his audience were mostly whites.He made blacks have a pessimistic image of themselves. I agree with Baldwin, Wright’s novel does fail as a protest novel, because it makes blacks seem like they are all murders and rapists with poor education and the living situations.
To begin with, Native Son attacks and offends a lot of black people including myself. Even though he was afraid of making black people look bad, he was fighting a battle. Wright figured that this was what white people would be interested in reading, but he knew he couldn’t pretend like these racial problems weren’t happening around him. Wright reveals how the white racism causes changes of behaviors, feelings and impressions of Bigger Thomas. “Every time I get to thinking about me being black and they being white, me being here and they being there, I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me”. By reading that quote and realizing that Bigger was in fear about his life that something can happen to him at any given second. In the novel, Bigger’s wrongdoings gave me a feeling that racism from the 1930s is somewhat similar to the racism we are still having now.
Although, the choices Bigger made wasn’t good ones he also became the most hated black man by society. Bigger figured if he only robs from black people then he wouldn’t get in trouble because he knows that the cops would careless about the situation. Later on his fear turns him into murdering Mary Dalton and causing violence to save his manhood. According to Native Son “Though he had killed by accident, not once did he feel the need to tell himself that it had been an accident. He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said.” Basically it’s saying that they he would automatically be accused of murder even if he didn’t do it but because he was a black man. This goes to show you how cricket the justice system was and how they didn’t wanna hear Bigger’s testimony or believe anything he said.
However, Bigger had a poor education with him being uneducated and only making it to the eighth grade. His outrageous life and lack of education Bigger was offered an opportunity to obtain education though going to night school and work for the Daltons. This is an opportunity that only few black people get. Most of blacks didn’t know how to read or write at the time. Many of them had the knowledge of a second grader. Therefore, the living situation that Bigger was living in was not the best. The one bedroom apartment was so tiny, filled with mold and big rats.They struggled to keep food on the table. His mother and sister were both terrified of the rats so Bigger had to kill the rat with a skillet. He is then forced by this mother to go find a job which could have potentially moved both his sister and mother out of that dump.
As stated by the narrator, Now and then a street car rattled past over steel tracks. He was sick of his life at home. Day in and day out there was nothing but shouts and bickering.” He just wanted a better life condition for him and his family, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen because of the discrimination. Black people couldn’t have anything nice, they just had to live in those kind of predicaments. Furthermore, James Baldwin described the book as being poorly defective. According to Baldwins Everybody Protest Novel, “Below the surface of this novel there lies, as if seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy”.
Baldwin is basically saying that Native Son was meant to demolish the black culture and to have a pessimistic outlook from other people. Baldwin figured that Wright was fairly disconnected from the African American culture. This racial dilemma caused a lot of confusion and anger. In other words, I think every African American person who has read Native Son would have preferred a more gentle character and a less critical identification people would have on black people.We would have been more pleased with encouraging the intended white readers instead of frighten them. As stated by Baldwin, “ Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden”. Meaning that society needs to come together as one but if we have all these “evil” things going on that we made for the base of our life that we try to run from.
To conclude, Native Son showed how a black man revolted against the way he was treated by society. I agree with Baldwin, Wright’s novel does fail as a protest novel, because it makes blacks seem like they are all murders and rapists with poor education and the living situations. Throughout the book, Wrights views towards racism is a horrific inequality of the justice system back in the 1930s. For example, Bigger’s case was going through a brutal racism cycle of an African American man who murdered a white woman is automatically guilty no matter what. The system neglected him to the point where he couldn’t even defend himself. Nobody wanted to listen to anything he had to say. This shows how corrupt the judiciary is and holds no meaning towards equal justice under law.
