Self-Esteem In Richard Wright's Black Boy

As a child or an adult, everyone feel the need to be acknowledged from one and another. As a person, everyone needs their spotlight sometimes, we all wanted a reputation, status, responsibility. Black Boy is a memoir by Richard Wright, where he illustrates his status and reputation in the South as a child, teen and adult. Richard goes through many mistreatments and disrespects, the community around him rejects his fundamental rights of a mentally healthy human being. In Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Richard struggles with how to feel good about himself, but ultimately his experience promotes him to be a great writer that unites people through his words.
As a kid, Richard struggles to construct his self-esteem with erroneous and naive methods, …show more content…
As Richard matures, his environment can no longer support him, so he starts to look for jobs and start working. But the first job he found is also his first lesson about the white community. A white woman hires him, and after working for her for a day, “the woman has assaulted [his] ego” by saying that he can’t be a writer just because of his race. The racism lowers Richard’s self-esteem because “she had assumed that she knew [his] place in life”(142). Richard esteem needs is not met down because of his first employer, he is discouraged by the white community on his first day of his job. All day in his life he’s always dispirits, even at home, in the environment of a family, his own blood doesn’t accept him. His uncle tells his cousin to stay away from him and he witnessed it, “ though [he] must have seemed brutal and desperate to [his uncle], [he] have never thought of [himself] as being so, and now [he] is appalled at how [he] was regarded”(173). Richard’s first time seeing himself through someone else’s eyes, and he recognized how low his reputation is in his own family demonstrates his self-esteem needs not met. Richard is always being cast out of his world, he hates the place he’s in, that he wanted to leave, but with his conditions he can’t, so he turned to illegal activity, stealing. After he steals and achieve enough money to leave, …show more content…
Richard continues his life as a young adult in the South, earning money to go to the North, Richard only made it to Memphis with the amount of money that he had. In Memphis, he keep working, Richard was deceived by a white man at the job into fighting another African American. Richard fights Harrison, the white men views Richard like an animal, that makes Richard “hated [Harrison] and hated [himself]”. Richard feels like he have no status and reputations when he fights Harrison indicates that his self-esteem is not met. After making enough money, Richard gets out of the South and moves to Chicago, he continues to work there to make money to bring his family North. He works at a cafe and he makes body contact with one of the waitress and he notices that “ she was not conscious of [his] blackness or of what her actions would have meant in the South”. Richard astonishment illustrates his self-esteem met because now in the North he has a higher status and that fact surprises him. Richard joins the Communist party to write, but his own people don’t accept the fact that he is resourceful person so “ the word “writer”was enough to make [him] feel that the man whom the