Wright, Richard

1908–1960

African-American Writer

Richard Wright explored the experiences of black men in America, focusing on their despair under, and resistance to, the racism of the early to mid-twentieth century. Several of Wright's novels problematize African-American masculinity by questioning the possibility that black men can achieve true manhood while also confronting a code of capitalism and white supremacy that defines all black males as “boys.”

Born in Mississippi, Wright was deserted by his sharecropper father at the age of ten. After a youth spent sporadically working and going to school, he moved to Chicago during the Great Depression and became involved in politics. He joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s and began writing novels celebrating communism as a guarantor of equality and justice—and as a vehicle for realizing black manhood. He continued to advocate communism and class struggle throughout his career, arguing in Lawd Today (published posthumously in 1963) that the black nationalism embraced by such groups as the Nation of Islam offered only psychological solace and failed to rectify the emasculating realities of capitalism.

Wright typically employed Marxist and psychoanalytical concepts to examine black masculinity. Considering a reasonable wage, economic independence, and the ability to support one's family crucial to a fulfilled black masculinity, he believed that black men were prevented from fulfilling their prescribed manly roles, that they were emasculated and infantilized, both by whites' racism and by their own responses to it. Wright maintained that black men—relegated to “boy” status and forced to depend on their wives, mothers, and daughters for financial support—responded through regressive actions that only underscored and reinforced their boyishness, whether it be by killing their white father (literally or symbolically), embracing black nationalism, or remaining submissive. To Wright, standard black responses to American racism highlighted the elusiveness of an African-American manhood.

These themes of infantilization and impotence recur in Wright's works. In Native Son (1940), for instance, the large, tough, and brutish protagonist Bigger Thomas responds to the harshness of postemancipation Chicago—with its pernicious landlords, brutal police, and unscrupulous politicians—by bullying his family, carrying a gun, and robbing stores. Larger and more violent (but no more effectual a man) than a stereotypical “Uncle Tom,” Bigger Thomas tragically internalizes and becomes trapped by the “boy” stereotype. Bigger's sexuality further demonstrates his inability to achieve manhood. From masturbating in a movie theater to forming abortive sexual relationships with his girlfriend Bessie and his boss's daughter Mary Dalton (ending in the murder of both), he yearns for sensation without regard for consequences. Similarly, in Lawd Today, the main character, Jake, deals with his feelings of confinement and alienation through infantilized fantasies of quick fixes, immediate (sexual) gratification, and a yearning for maternal love. Wright's autobiographical Black Boy (1945) concludes that the black man's inability to transcend boyhood leads to an absolute despair that reinforces submission.

Wright addressed many themes and issues, but his career (and the power of his work) was grounded in his frank exploration of futility and unfulfilled black manhood—themes that continue to resonate in contemporary black America.