The Negative Effects Of Racism In Richard Wright's Black Boy

Although the negative impacts of racism are evident and many agree on a consensus that it hurts minorities, racism still continues to thrive today. Many African Americans and minorities are still being treated unequally, and it is clearly shown in almost every part of social media and the news. The novel Black Boy by Richard Wright visually represents the effects of racism on a black boy growing up during the 1940’s. During Wright’s time racism was considered normal on a daily basis and many African Americans including Wright himself became oppressed and had to fear death when accidentally insulting a white man or woman. Richard Wright was born after the Civil War, but before the Civil Rights Movement. If he were writing an autobiography today …show more content…
Racial profiling, or the practice of discrimination negatively affects many African Americans. Even today, discrimination exists to a certain extent and several police violences occur toward African Americans. One article titled, “Is everyone a little bit racist?” by Nicholas Kristof, states that the police arrests blacks at a rate 3.7 times that of the rates of white for possession of marijuana. The article also interviews several police officers and one officer particularly stated, “I shot armed blacks in an average of 0.679 seconds while waiting slightly longer — 0.694 seconds — to shoot armed whites. I also holstered more quickly when confronted with unarmed whites than with unarmed blacks.” Another article titled, “The disproportionate risks of driving while black” by Sharon Lafraniere and Andrew Lehren, states that the Greensboro police has filed charges against 836 blacks but only 209 whites. In addition, blacks are four times as more likely than white people to be arrested in Greensboro. Most importantly, blacks only represent 41 percent of the population of Greensboro, yet there is a great disproportion of blacks to whites on arrests and