Use of Language Expression in the of Racism
Chapter One
Purpose Of Study
The purpose of this study is to determine the use language in the expression of racism of Richard Wright in his autobiography BlackBoy.
This essay concentrates on the theme of racism in Black American literature. Our intention is to show that racism indeed is a prominent theme in BlackBoy especially because the book was written during the Jim Crow era at a point where racism was very prominent in the American society.
It also looks at the personal understanding of the Blackman’s point of view and his situation. Examples of racism and oppression are cited in BlackBoy. This project exposes how racism and oppression affects the mentality and the way of living of the Black race, reducing them to a level of inferiority, in every aspect of their lives.
CHAPTER TWO
STEREOTYPING BLACKNESS: ARRESTING BLACK MALE
SUBJECTIVITY
“Uncle Tom” and the Negation of Black Manhood
The study of black embodiment allows the achievement of twin acts of deconstruction, each act shedding a special light on the inner workings of white racial discourse and its perception of the Other. On a first level of analysis, embodiment exposes the ways whiteness as a hegemonic discourse relegates black male subjectivity to mere biological existence, denying it manhood and self-fulfillment. On a second level, the realization that whiteness is not the humanistic and enlightened discourse it pretends to be (since it can defend its presumed high moral standing only by dehumanizing its black Others), leads to the notion that whiteness is an anxious form of subjectivity predicated and dependent on a complex process of difference-making. In this regard, the exploration of black male embodiment not only helps retrieve the status of the black male subject as an identity denied by white racial discourse but also tells more about the instability of white identity itself and its mythical formation.
Yet for a full understanding of the place of black male subjectivity in the hegemonic discourse of whiteness to be possible, this chapter will study the white discourse of identity through the prism of the discursive regimes of truth which make it and which it galvanizes to produce the black subject in the restrictive terms of its embodiment. It will map out the ways in which white discourse relies on an arsenal of truths, values and claims in its adamant bid to confine blackness to biology and deny it the intellectual and human traits necessary for subjectivity. Deploying Foucauldian theory of discourse, it will show that whiteness as a discourse functions and is the articulation of a subtle relation of knowledge to power. Foucault defines discourse as the manifestation of networks of truths and knowledge which are deployed to favor and disenfranchise or include and exclude social subjects. As such, discourse presents power as an intricate configuration which is wielded on the level of systems of values and social institutions which draw and maintain the boundaries between what is true and what is not (Order 52-3). In this light, whiteness as a discourse produces regimes of representations and truths about the black body in order to control it. These systems of truth which are produced as a form of stereotypical knowledge are maintained through a network of institutions, varying from journalism to court law and the values of white mass culture.
In Wright’s corpus, blacks usually interact with white society in ways that reveal the limitations placed on them by white institutions. They deal with them only to get menial work that generates income to survive. They also relate to white society through acts of violence like beating, lynching and castration which target the bodies of black subjects who are suspected of violating the rules and prohibitions which maintain white supremacy and black subordination. Lawd depicts the everyday life of Jake Jackson, the protagonist, and his three post office friends who deal with whites on a few occasions only, all of them at the workplace. Jake’s only exposure to white people is through his job at the post office where he performs tasks assigned to him by his employer. The other instances where he gets into contact with whites are at the meeting with the Board Review of the post office when he is interrogated and humiliated over abusing his wife and when he comes to borrow more money from the white accountant, increasing his debt and worsening his financial situation. Apart from these interactions, Jake’s exposure to the white world is evinced through his consumption of and subjection to its cultural discourses disseminated through mass culture discourses of the cinema and the press.
Key as these encounters are in showing Jake’s subordinate position to the white order, their limited number, however, reveals that Jake’s world has already succumbed to hegemonic white structures and institutions to the extent that he acts out the ideology of whites without the need of their intervention. These are the institutions of popular culture and mass media like the radio, newspapers and movies which dominate Jake’s perceptions, set his priorities and channel his energies into a blind faith in the popular master narrative of the American Dream of success. Brannon Costello argues that Jake’s passivity in the face of the challenges facing his life under white rule is a reflection of how much he is subjugated and penetrated by these discourses of white popular culture.
He says that “If Jake does not have a primary alternative belief system, another master narrative that explains the world to him, he finds it in the American success myth pervasive in the popular culture–newspaper, radio, films–that he consumes” (66). The appeal of this popular culture to Jake is translated into his optimistic and happy relation to the prevailing consumer culture of capitalism, in spite of the fact that his poverty and exclusion are direct results of its logic.
CHAPTER THREE
BEYOND NATIONALISM: BREAKING THE CLOSURE OF BLACK CULTURE
Geographies of Despair: Blacks’ Place of Confinement
Wright’s fiction locates the plight of black male subjectivity in the essentialising narrative of Enlightenment which grounds identity in the realm of absolute difference, producing a unitary, whole and fixed self that is anchored in the purity of nationalistic culture. To pinpoint the shortcomings of this imaginary mode of identification which sustains the supremacist allegations of white culture and its negation of black identity, this chapter will explore how Wright’s fiction does not fall back on a simplistic celebration of his own nationalistic black folk culture, focusing on its resistance to and denigration of any unproblematic embracing of black culture that asserts identity in the exclusive terms of origin and race. In a fashion similar to his debunking of white culture’s positivist assumptions about blacks, Wright denounces nationalism and black culture, showing that they are governed by the same forces and founded on the same premises that trapped black male subjects under white racism. Mindful of this specular relationship between white culture and black nationalism where identity is figured in the positivity of a central self that is defined in relation to its negating other, Wright’s fiction sets out to explore black culture’s collaboration with the white system in denying black male subjects access to agency and the limitations it places on them as a proxy agent of domination.
The overlap between white Law and black culture resembles a kind of a division of labor where the first uses the threat of death and lynching to define and police black subjects in the public sphere while the second uses the family as a site to coerce them into conformity and acquiescence to their place of marginality. The family Law stands, therefore, for black culture’s complicity in forcing white hegemony upon black males and ensuring their acceptance of its dictates. It is, in the words of Stephen Michael Best “an heuristic tool of lynch law. That is to say, family law is the site where hegemony is made tangible, the domain where blacks give over their rights to agency” (115; emphasis in original). Instead of providing black subjects with the moral support and cultural coherence necessary to protect them from the disorienting effects of white Law and its ubiquitous use of violence, black culture, considered in this light, becomes an extension of white hegemony that further consolidates their formation as racialized non-entities occupying a place of non-identity.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARGINALITY AND AGENCY
Mimicry and Black Face
Wright’s refusal to go down the path of nationalism and endow his black male subjects with racial consciousness to counter white hegemony underpins his critical skepticism of the availability of an easy and ready-to-hand exit from the closed structure of dominant white culture. Wary of whiteness’ humanistic self-centred mode of identification which can conceive of identity only in terms of racial fixity and cultural purity, his vehement denigration of black culture is guided by a critical will not to repeat the totalizing structures of whiteness by opting for a similar black nationalist identity that rests on the glorification of the same and the familiar while rejecting the Other and the different. This chapter will try to identify how he turns away from seeking strategic modes of resistance that would grant his black male subjects access to agency through an outside alternative that in attempting to overcome the existent hegemony ends up repeating and reproducing it. It argues that he negotiates sites of resistance and explores opening ups for agency from within the white humanistic totality itself, countering its crippling effects on black subjects through hybridity and mimicry.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
This study has sought to map out the use of language in the expression of racism in the fractured nature of black boy by Richard Wright. Research across this theme has shown the mutual relationship between the experience of fragmented subjectivity among black male characters and the absence of the social and cultural referents that traditionally are credited with providing subjects with consciousness to develop as mature and whole. In Wright’s narratives, black masculinity undergoes different forms of fragmentation, ranging from physical dismemberment to moral and personal negation. Largely set within a racist context marked by segregation,
Wright’s fiction features black male figures who suffer fragmentation through violence against their bodies and their very physical being. Irrespective of whether these black characters struggle against the challenges of racism in the South or the North, they are always haunted by the specter of violence in the form of beatings, lynchings and other kinds of extrajudicial killings. This physical violence, which also involves starving and keeping blacks hungry, is deployed by white power to ensure black males’ powerlessness and deprivation of agency. In this way, it functions as a disciplinary strategy that requires the destruction of black male bodies to maintain them under white control and supremacy.
A central contention in this study is that the disfigurement of black male bodies has also to do with the deployment of discursive representation in ways that are no less devastating and debilitating than the effects of physical violence. For if black characters in these novels can challenge the white order’s use of violence by accepting death, stripping it of the power to control their lives, they can only play with and manipulate the discursive structures and ideological networks that define them as inferior and subsequently banish them from citizenship and the rights that come along with it. Black male subjects claim agency by embracing death, undermining its value as a coercive tool, but never succeed in totally subverting the discursive networks that govern them and circumscribe their marginal place. Instead of ditching these discursive regimes altogether, black characters settle for manipulating the white order through trickery and dissemblance, opting for hybrid subject positions and capitalizing on their cleavage and fragmentation to achieve agency.
Black male fragmentation also functions in the same way in its relation to the black community. For as much as the tension between black masculine characters and their kindred reveals their feeling of homelessness and psychological malaise, it also foregrounds the mythological character of race and folk culture as stable categories of identification. As with the white community, the fracture of black masculinity attests to the black community’s attempt to suppress dissent and its unwillingness to recognize heterogeneity. Driven by a nationalist desire, it defines itself and preserves its racial imaginings by producing black misfits who are pushed to the edge of social experience. According to this mutual process, the black sense of community and racial consciousness are sustained at the site where black masculinity is denied and where its bid for voice and difference are crushed. All the novels analyzed in this study feature black male characters who are sidelined by their familial and social demands for conformity and subjected to violence or completely excommunicated for their rebellion against the social values defining the black status quo.
The various texts discussed in this thesis are significant for Wright’s overall attempt to unveil the covert metaphysics by which whiteness presents itself as a homogeneous and legitimate structure of identification as it constructs black masculine subjecthood through the negative lenses of the stereotype. These texts bring this discrete metaphysics to light by interrogating whiteness’s humanist moral values and truth networks through an encounter with the black masculine which draws parallels between its racialization and white identity’s desire for power. This study has shown that this approach enables a critical reading of whiteness that disrupts it as a stable category of identification and reveals the fissures and cracks which threaten to tear it asunder. It has demonstrated how whiteness is as much an invention as blackness and that the construction of the black masculine along the lines of the stereotype hides a similar and related construction of white identity in opposite terms.
The textual analysis of this metaphysics, through Savage Holiday, “Lawd Today!” and Native Son, permits the questioning of whiteness’s Manichean order and brings its contradictions and ambivalences into the open. The three narratives reveal in different ways how this metaphysics rests on whiteness’s complex relationship to embodiment. They complicate its claims that white identity is unraced and disembodied because it has more to do with the soul than the body. Savage Holiday, in particular, explores whiteness’s presumed disembodiment through the repressed desires, moral pretentions and sexual fantasies of its embattled protagonist, Erskine Fowler. A middleclass figure and symbol of the American Dream of hard work and success, Fowler is pictured in terms of his avowed professional and religious ethics. Bodiless and exclusively defined on the grounds of his intellect and spirituality, he is both a retired man who, thanks to his work values and intelligence, is able to make it to the top of his profession and a religious preacher set on a sacred mission to reform his neighbor, Mabel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
- Wright, Richard. Black Power: Three Books From Exile: Black Power, the Color Curtain and White Man, Listen! New York: Harper & Brothers, 2008. Print.
- —. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. Ed. Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 52-60. Print.
- —. Early Works: Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: HarperCollins, 1984. Print.
- —. Eight Men. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Print.
- —. Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger), The Outsider. Ed. Arnold Rampersad.
- New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Print.
- —. Native Son. New York: Harper & Row, 1940. Print.
- —. Pagan Spain. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. Print.
