Abstract
This essay examines the role of gender in Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, arguing that misogyny is such an intrinsic part of an overarching racist patriarchy that even its resisters cannot escape it in their own seemingly resistant language. Where Wright attempts to resist his oppression through language he instead perpetuates it through his use of the feminine, thus bolstering racist patriarchal structure. Despite the convincing critiques Black Boy offers regarding the racist hypocrisy of the North and the brutal Jim Crow South, Richard Wright’s ultimate attack on American racism fails as true resistance because it is built on the unexamined foundation of sexism. Using Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory and the frameworks of bell hooks and Monique Wittig, the essay demonstrates how women in Black Boy serve as mirrors in which the narrator negatively views himself, rather than being granted their own agency.
Despite popular notions to the contrary neither Shawn Carter nor other rap stars invented the use of the feminine as a mirror of personal and social ills, or in this case, as a mirror to the black man’s plight. In a patriarchal and racist centuries-old culture this has been the method of choice in many of our literary and artistic narratives. Richard Wright, the famed black writer of the 1940’s is no exception. In 1940 he received critical acclaim for his novel Native Son and, later, for his autobiography Black Boy in 1945. Both were praised for their truthful renderings of black male life.
In his book On Autobiography Philip Lejeune defines the genre as “the story of [the author’s] personality” and this is the best way to read Black Boy. The genesis of the narrator’s personality written by Richard Wright occurs at the locus of the feminine within the unconsciously shared space of racism’s misogyny. The genesis of Wright’s narrator is not one of rebellion and resistance, but it is the genesis of Wright’s misogyny as well as Richard’s — it is the story of a failed resistance.
Wright’s autobiographical narrator brilliantly reflects the racist oppressive structure he lives in so as to flip and nullify it for his own desperate liberation; but his narrative is unfortunately saturated with the broken, fragile, threatening, demeaned or demeaning black woman. Though Richard offers himself up as a mirror to racism in order to judge and condemn it, the women in his life serve as mirrors in which he negatively views himself. Never are the women to have their own agency in the same way Richard gets to fight for and eventually gain.
In the first paragraph of Black Boy four-year-old Richard presents his mother and grandmother as distant and frightening. Despite Wright’s autobiographical intention to reveal and battle racism, his narrative begins with his subjugation at the hands of black women not of whites. Richard’s first job involved witnessing a gruesome attack on a black woman, yet both Wright and critic Abdul R. JanMohamed completely overlook the woman’s brutalization, using it only as a sign of Richard’s threatened liberation.
Richard is critically aware of the racist oppression that binds him. But he never seems to see the role of women nor the theme of sexism as involved in the same oppressive structure from which he’s running. Rather, this is the continuum of white patriarchy that he takes as natural. To quote the cultural critic bell hooks, Wright’s Black Boy exists in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It is patriarchy that is crucial to our understanding Richard’s failure to critique or even to escape his racist origins. We have to look at misogyny and sexism as another dimension of racism’s architecture. So to challenge it requires an abandonment of all its dimensions, or the challenge fails and merely folds in on itself.
Whether it is through speaking protest, rapping it, or writing it there is still the shadow in the corner, a smudge in the ink, keeping one’s reflection from completion. And those resisting are left puzzled scratching at the spot on the glass.