Richard Wright’s Black Boy

From a young age, children are taught that their actions speak louder than words. People are judged by others on their actions, but their judgment of themselves is based on other’s perceptions. This can be seen in the relationship between blacks and whites in the mid twentieth century through the actions of the characters in Black Boy by Richard Wright and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. What people believe about themselves, along with their actions, are what shape their character and how they relate to other people.

The blacks in Richard Wright’s Black Boy were looked at as children by the whites. The black people, with the exception of Richard, accepted this expectation of them and instead of maturing and ‘growing up’ the blacks remained childish, immature, willing to do anything for money. Shorty, with whom Richard worked in Memphis, was willing to let white people kick him for a quarter. He (Shorty) justified this by saying that his “…ass is tough and quarters is scarce”(229), but the fact that he would let someone else kick him for a quarter showed that he had accepted the low level of self worth which white people expected of him. He became like the child who acts silly for a cookie. The reason most all the blacks did this was partially because it was how they were raised, and as they all had started working at a young age, they were raised from their literal childhood to behave mentally childish according to the white people’s expectations of them. This was a major reason Richard fought the system so much, he did not have to work for the white people until he was almost an adult, so he had no idea of how to act around whites and fought the yoke of fawning obedience which the other blacks uncomplainingly wore.

The black people claimed to hate the whites, but their dramaturgical actions proved that even though they got angry because of their treatment, like a child, they were helpless against the white authority. Even if they had had the power to rebel against the white society, many of them would not have because they had accepted the molded characters that the whites gave them.

Blacks occupied the lowest rung of the totem pole of authority in the white community, but as we see in The Bluest Eye, even the