Afterword

 

And, for the record now, allow me to make a reading recommendation for authoritarians, left and right, and for non-authoritarians as well -- Richard Wright's Native Son.  Native Son is a hard book to read -- intentionally so. It challenges assumptions on the Left that being oppressed is any proof of virtue, and assumptions on the Right that systematic racism does not exist and that everyone can get ahead by individual effort.

If a White person were to write such a novel, it would be dismissed as racist.  But Native Son is by a Black man, a Communist, no less, wanting to rub his audience's nose in certain cold hard facts and deny them the comfort of any sympathy or warm feelings.

Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black youth in Chicago, 1940.  Bigger lives in a squalid, rat-infested ghetto and has a longstanding history of petty crime -- all with Black victims since he has never dared take on a White victim.  And he ends up accidentally killing a very naive, well-intentioned White girl who was trying, in a clumsy, unwelcome way, to help him, tripping himself up with attempts to cover up the crime, and being sentenced to the electric chair.

Bigger is not a sympathetic protagonist. But the novel sets out to make the point of how circumstances made him.

The journalism in the novel is egregiously racist in a way that would be unthinkable these days.  (Wright says it was based on actual stories in newspapers around the time he wrote the novel).  But other than the journalists who write the stories, the White characters in the novel individually seem like decent people, police and DA's seeking Bigger's execution included.  

While the novel is meant primarily to discomfort liberals who seek to acquit themselves of systematic racism, it ought also to discomfort conservatives who deny that such a thing exists.  Yes, sometimes it could almost be taken as endorsing the "Snake Song."  Bigger's liberal employer takes him in, offers him a job, and is rewarded by the murder of his Communist-sympathizing daughter.  Right wingers might take this as proof that parents should not expose their children to any liberal notions that might lead to Communist sympathies, keep their children in line, not try to help disadvantaged Black people, and maintain strict law and order.

But the novel also discusses systematic racism and the way that individually good people can be complicit.  Bigger's lawyer in vests in the rat-infested tenements where Bigger lives -- not personally, but through a complex set of corporations.  And the business ethics of the day do not allow him to admit Black renters to any other neighborhoods.

And, in the end, the final third of the novel consists largely of a lecture by Boris ("Author Insert") Max, the Communist lawyer seeking to get Bigger off on a sentence of life imprisonment, and his explanation of how racism pervades the larger society and deprives men like Bigger of hope.

It is uncomfortable reading.  That is why it should be encouraged.