SUMMARY: Bigger Thomas, a poor, uneducated, twenty-year-old black man in 1930s Chicago, wakes up one morning in his family’s cramped apartment on the South Side of the city. He sees a huge rat scamper across the room, which he corners and kills with a skillet. Having grown up under the climate of harsh racial prejudice in 1930s America, Bigger is burdened with a powerful conviction that he has no control over his life and that he cannot aspire to anything other than menial, low-wage labor. His mother pesters him to take a job with a rich white man named Mr. Dalton, but Bigger instead chooses to meet up with his friends to plan the robbery of a white man’s store.
Anger, fear, and frustration define Bigger’s daily existence, as he is forced to hide behind a façade of toughness or risk succumbing to despair. While Bigger and his gang have robbed many black-owned businesses, they have never attempted to rob a white man. Bigger sees whites not as individuals, but as a natural, oppressive force—a great looming “whiteness” pressing down upon him. Bigger’s fear of confronting this force overwhelms him, but rather than admit his fear, he violently attacks a member of his gang to sabotage the robbery. Left with no other options, Bigger takes a job as a chauffeur for the Daltons.
Coincidentally, Mr. Dalton is also Bigger’s landlord, as he owns a controlling share of the company that manages the apartment building where Bigger’s family lives. Mr. Dalton and other wealthy real estate barons are effectively robbing the poor, black tenants on Chicago’s South Side—they refuse to allow blacks to rent apartments in predominantly white neighborhoods, thus leading to overpopulation and artificially high rents in the predominantly black South Side. Mr. Dalton sees himself as a benevolent philanthropist, however, as he donates money to black schools and offers jobs to “poor, timid black boys” like Bigger. However, Mr. Dalton practices this token philanthropy mainly to alleviate his guilty conscience for exploiting poor blacks...
Richard Wright's writing showed the ongoing oppression of the black race by the white race in the 1930's which many believe has continued well into the 21st Century and will continue far beyond unless something drastically happens here in the USA...
One would have thought that a BLACK PRESIDENT like Barrack Obama who was President for EIGHT YEARS would have been able to change the system... but very little if anything changed for the Black race except maybe a little more employment in government positions.
Richard Wright died in Paris, France in 1960 and one can only again assume that he felt better appreciated and treated in a foreign country than in the country in which he was born.
WHITES have treated the BLACKS terribly and many WHITE people make generous donations to black causes OUT OF THE GUILT they feel and while I suppose that is good for the BLACKS, there are MANY WHITES that are not involved in oppressive treatment of the BLACKS and therefore do not feel guilty at all because of what someone else did or did not do.
No comments:
Post a Comment