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The Role Of Racism In Richard Wright's Black Boy

706 Words3 Pages

Does America have a problem with race? This is a question that millions of Americans are asking today. We have a problem because our society is built to benefit white males, not everyone. Richard Wright the author of Black Boy grew up when being racist was not seen as an insult. If he was living in our era, he would talk about similar issues in his writing. Richard Wright the author of Black Boy, would talk about economic inequality, institutionalized racism, and stereotyping and how they affect the success of Black males in america. Black people have a much harder time being economically stable. Ever since slavery black people have been at the bottom of the socio economic class system that our society has built over the years. Wright knows …show more content…

It’s the little things that ultimately amount to a society having a bias towards whites It is all or the subconsciously racist things we might do. Although we might think we have no bias, it 's very common to have a small bias towards your race. Wright grew up in a time where being openly racist was fairly normal or not frowned upon. It was just more normal back then. But, now institutionalized racism is holding black people down. A study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research was with these two people sending job applications to various companies that were hiring. One application had a white sounding name at the top while the other had a black name at the top.. A quote from this study “Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.” These companies were seeing some non-existent skills that the white had but the African-Americans lacked. This is an example of Institutionalized racism in our society. This would be included in Wright 's writing because, it is a very large reason of why it 's harder for blacks to succeed in modern times, because of the subtle racism that people tend

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