Richard Wright Black Boy Analysis

Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy is both a chilling and humanizing memoir that details the struggles of a young African American man in the Jim Crow south. Throughout the narrative, we witness Wright’s young self ‘Richard’ evolve. One of Wrights purposes in this memoir is explore the oppression of ideas of African Americans in the south. In the beginning of the text, Richard Wright is very curious, almost dangerously curious. However, by the end of part one, he has become very cautious and has come to checking himself before saying anything. Wright dramatizes this transformation through his use of the motif of the oppression of freedoms of ideas.
` Towards the beginning of the narrative, Wright is a young boy that is dangerously curious, …show more content…
He has learned from experience that black men are expected to act differently from whites. This has turned him into a very cautious, anxiety fill young man, a quality Wright, again, shows through the motif of oppression of ideas and freedoms. While Richard is working at his job in the drugstore, people, including whites, start yelling at him from all around him, to fetch them items from the shelving. Wright explains “My sustained expectation of violence exhausted me. My preoccupation with curbing my impulses, my speech, my movements, my manner, had increased my anxiety.” (195) Richard has had a ‘sustained expectation’ that people would turn against him violently if he did the wrong thing, which has been done to him before. This ‘exhausts’ him because of how cautiously worried he always is. His ‘preoccupation’ with ‘curbing’ his impulses, speech, movements and mannar have slowly grinded away at Richard. Being extremely cautious about everything he says and does has not made anything better, but just increased his anxiety. Wright uses the motif of oppression of ideas and freedoms to portray how tired and exhausted he is of always having to hold up his guard. He knows, as an oppressed black boy, one false step could mean the end for him. Later in the end of the narrative, Wright shows a resembling extreme cautiousness. Richard finds himself extremely interested in writings by the author H. L. Mencken. He knows he needs a white mans library card but he needs to decide which one with not get him in trouble when he asks. Wright thinks to himself “I had so far been successful in hiding my thoughts and feelings from them (whites), but I knew that I would create hostility if I went around this business of reading in a clumsy way.” (245). Richard has been forced to ‘hide’ his real thoughts from the world around him to protect himself, but now with the love of books Wright hopes he will not