Toxic Masculinity In Richard Wright's Black Boy

The author Richard Wright illustrates how racial hatred and violence manifest as toxic masculinity, through the isolation of young black boys in his memoir Black Boy, Richard Wright’s memoir is more profound than an aspiring writer who experiences many hardships through his childhood. This memoir presents Richard as a boy learning and experiencing the effects of being a Black boy in a society that will continuously exploit and oppress him. Reading the chapters on his childhood one can see a recurrent topic of toxic masculinity vividly present through his experiences and relationships. Despite being written in 1945, Richard Wright’s memoir offers a great insight into social issues today such as practicing safe discipline on our children

Richard couldn't comprehend why Black men were unfairly convicted unlike White men, “ Then why don’t all the black men fight all the white men out there? There are more black men than white men… ”, his mother responds, “But the white men have guns and the black men don’t”(Wright 58). This experience with the chain gang would be the first of many in his life that would define the hierarchy White people held over him. Experiences, such as being fired on a whim and forced into a violent game among White men. As a young boy, this division between Black and White was very clear to Richard, forming a conditioned hate in him. According to Richard, this shared hatred among young black boys was the beginning of creating their masculinity through the use of vulgar language, violent fights, fouling the identity of girls, and deep arguments about race. Richards describes how he and other young boys frantically tried to convince themselves that their characters were independent and racial issues had no hold or shape on them but instead, they simply hid the true helplessness they felt in a society that works against them. As an adult, He illustrates the division of race as a cultivation of self-hatred in men, “Hated by Whites and being an organic part of the culture that hated him, the black man grew in turn to hate in himself that which others

Not to be mistaken by a reclaim of dominance, the toxic masculinity illustrated in Richards's memoir is evidence of the indoctrination of the black man through the oppression he faces, which breaks his identity, forcing him to defend his identity and protect himself through toxic masculinity. This is evident through the discipline Richard receives from male figures throughout his childhood. Rebelling against his superior father, Richard kills a cat on a play of his own father's words, “I had my first triumph over my father. I had made him believe that I had taken his words literally. He would not punish me now, I thought, risking his own authority.”(Wright 12). Richard seemingly overtook the authority and violence his father held against him but as with any other beating the retaliations of his rebellion got to him as the moral judgment of killing a cat taught him a lesson of fear of retaliation. Richards's father unknowingly represented the figures which in the future would oppress and keep from ever rebelling against him. The childhood of a young boy becomes a lesson for a father that plays as the inoculation of his future through his toxic masculinity. Having an absent father, Richards's mother Ella Wilson performed this role, the role to inflict painful punishment that will warn and protect their child from the behavior that will get them otherwise killed, “I was chastened