Tolerance In Richard Wright's Black Boy

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Tolerance Doesn’t Exist Barbara Johnson once stated, “ We as human beings, must be willing to accept people who are different from ourselves.” Society should at least put an effort in accepting others despite the fact that one might like only a few out of a hundred people. That is exactly the problem. Some people can’t put an effort into simply enduring the fact that not everyone is going to be just like them.
The first step to acceptance would be understanding. Society will never understand what one has gone through; yet, it still has the nerve to point out and criticize everything wrong about someone just by their appearance. In the novel, Black Boy, by Richard Wright, a story about the struggles of a black boy unfold. For colored people, …show more content…

In the novel Black Boy, Wright is living a life filled with constant neglect and segregation; however, even as a child, he was able to accept others without hurting them. When Mrs. Moss was obviously trying to force the idea of marriage with her daughter to Wright, he just simply replied that he didn’t want to get involved in her life and that he didn’t want to hurt her (Wright 213). This is just an example of one person who has accepted the idea of tolerance. During this exact time, Wright was being misjudged and mistreated by the people who believed that they were better than him. The flag case in “American Flag Stands For Tolerance” resulted in the freedom of Gregory Lee Johnson because the ultimate irony would have been to punish views expressed by burning the flag that stands for the right to those expressions (Allen 20). They let him off to hook for the sake of avoiding controversy. If they believed that he was innocent of no crime, they wouldn’t have arrested him in the first place. Those very few people who have embraced the idea of acceptance won’t be able to really change what our society has come