Oppression In Richard Wright's Black Boy Or Oprah Winfrey

How does one stop oppression? For most people, the answer is pretty difficult to find, if there even is one. For decades, people of all races and genders have been harassed and there hasn’t been any significant progress towards ending this oppression. It is because of this lack of development that makes it hard for characters like Richard Wright in Black Boy or Oprah Winfrey to be able to grow up and live normal, non-prejudiced lives. While society can attempt to trap individuals and terminate their options in life or subdue them through oppression, education and determination are important factors in overcoming that oppression. Nice Intro :^) To begin, people turn to education in order to combat and survive through the negativity deriving from oppression because it provides knowledge on living new lives. While discussing how reading novels opened up a new world of ideas for him, Richard then continues with this topic explaining that “...it was out of these novels and stories and articles, out of emotional impact and imaginative constructions of heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light” (Wright 282). Richard’s line in the passage exemplifies how reading has introduced him to a sense of “warmth from an unseen light”. The “warmth” that Richard feels is used as a metaphor and is compared to the feeling of safety and happiness from learning these new ideas of overcoming his life’s difficulties that he hadn’t been introduced to in the South …show more content…
Although the ideas in these pieces of evidence like Black Boy were presented in the past, many people still use these techniques to overcome hardships in life today. Even though the idea of oppression doesn’t seem to be going away soon, people learn how to overcome this and other hardships, in general, in one way or