Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/KENTUCKY/9780813175164.003.0010
R. Wright
Originally written for French audiences in 1951, Richard Wright seeks to address the question of how Willie McGee could be executed in Mississippi when doing so was clearly considered unjust in the world of democratic opinion. Wright settles the question of McGee’s innocence in a sentence and so turns to the plantation economy of Mississippi in an effort to contextualize the events. The most backward of US states in educational, cultural, and social terms, nothing had transpired economically since the Civil War to relieve whites’ complete domination of blacks, even though blacks vastly outnumbered whites in terms of population. This meant that whites had to hold state power through ongoing racial violence, terror, and repression. Still, after World War II, brutal lawlessness on the part of the United States became an international liability requiring that a move be made from extralegal to legal lynching. While white Mississippians had not anticipated that McGee’s execution would have negative global consequences, their barbarous standing in the eyes of the world was less significant to them than local pressures to defend white power over blacks. This did not mean that international agitation was without effect: it would force white Americans to think hard before staging another legal lynching and about the price of their continued race prejudice.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0003
L. Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon argues that Wright’s writings cast light on the suffocating world produced by colonialism, enslavement, and racism, in which black people are treated as if they simply don’t matter. Wright showed that blacks in the United States are fundamentally historically excluded from the political, aesthetic, and epistemic institutions of the only world to which they are indigenous. By pulling readers into places “they wished never to go,” he demonstrated how the erosion of black political power in fact increased political impotence among humankind. Wright, argues Gordon, was particularly prescient about the relationship between the racist state and twentieth-century fascism. They jointly eradicate conditions of political appearance and freedom, replacing them with unilateral rule.
刘易斯·r·戈登(Lewis R. Gordon)认为，赖特的作品揭示了由殖民主义、奴役和种族主义造成的令人窒息的世界，在这个世界里，黑人被视为无足轻重。赖特表明，美国黑人在历史上基本上被排除在政治、美学和认知机构之外，而他们是唯一的本土世界。通过把读者带到“他们永远不希望去的地方”，他展示了黑人政治权力的侵蚀实际上是如何增加了人类政治上的无能为力。戈登认为，赖特对种族主义国家与20世纪法西斯主义之间的关系尤其有先见之明。他们共同铲除政治表象和自由的条件，代之以单方面的统治。
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Pub Date : 2018-12-24DOI: 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0006
M. Nissim-Sabat
Some readers of Wright’s work have criticized him for failing to portray healthy human connection or solidarity. In her chapter, Marilyn Nissim-Sabbat maintains that Wright was deeply aware that people could only live as human beings through meaningful relations with one another. Wright understood both that the human need for solidarity runs deep and that the ability to forge it can be damaged. Without such solidarity, alienation from oneself and others will crush “Bigger” and Bigger-like characters on the South Side of Chicago and globally. Wright therefore championed the healing made possible by qualitatively enlarging our lived-experience of and with one another. Essential to articulating and acting on this need is a critical theory of transcendence that is implicit in Wright’s work. Such a theory emerges in this essay through a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s views on identity politics and cross-group identity in The Second Sex as contrasted with parallel discussions by Wright in Native Son.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-19DOI: 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.003.0018
R. Wright
Originally published in October 1935, Richard Wright describes the immediate aftermath of black boxer Joe Louis’s victory over then white champion Max Baer. On the South Side of Chicago, thousands of black people flooded into public spaces in celebration of a moment’s racial victory, an exceptional instance of black triumph over white. Taking strength from Louis’s strength, spontaneously assembled masses of black people felt temporarily and collectively free and invincible. They shook the hands of strangers in unleashed joy and stopped streetcars. Wright thought this cyclone of celebration exhibited a pent-up black folk consciousness that was hungry for freedom, an emboldened energy that could be harnessed and channeled politically. Although soon subsiding, these desires that had long been suppressed had been uncovered in Joe Louis’s victory.
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