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Poverty In Richard Wright's Autobiography, Black Boy

800 Words4 Pages

Richard Wright and His Life of Poverty

Richard Wright, author of the autobiography, Black Boy, which shows the reader a lot of things that happened to African Americans in the early 1900’s. Richard Wright had a life of poverty growing up. Richard lacked a good quality of daily life, family support, and food and money. Good quality of daily life involves racism, neglect, and hunger in Black Boy. Since Richard is an African American in this time period, Richard gets a lot of beatings and death threats for not treating whites correctly. Growing up Richard didn't really want to listen to anybody and he didn't know how to act around white people. Richard eventually learned, but he went through a lot of suffering in between this. “Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew the Negroes had never been allowed to …show more content…

Richard also goes through a lot of neglect in his life because he didn’t really have a providing family and many whites did not treat Richard like they would treat someone white. When Richard started working as a waterboy he got bit by the owner's dog. When the boss came to see him the boss said, “A dog bite can’t hurt a nigger.” This quote shows racism and neglect because the boss is treating him different because he is black, but if it was a white man then the boss would have done something. In Black Boy Richard also experiences hunger. Richard had to work a lot of jobs

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Anthony Dykema-VanderArk opens his literary criticism of Black Boy by Richard Wright by stating that Wright’s primary interest in his writing is to focus on the “influence of the environment on a person’s actions and attitudes” (Dykema-VanderArk 1). Dykema-VanderArk continues by explaining Richard’s toxic environment, which was full of racism, violence, and hunger. He then emphasizes how this environment has affected Richard psychologically by creating distance between himself and his family, but also by giving Richard the ambition to “go to great lengths to resist limitations placed on him” (Dykema-VanderArk 1). Richard’s psychological detriment both motivates him and holds him back. Dykema-VanderArk depicts that the lack of psychological fulfillment ultimately affects Richard more than physical hunger, “Richard 's hunger becomes a symbol not of his positive yearning but of his isolation and loneliness, his sense of exclusion from the world around him”

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