Democracy and Dilemma: Richard Wright’s Native Son

Abstract

Richard Wright’s Native Son marked an important watershed in the history of Black Literature and amply demonstrated how race had become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems with fundamentally opposed economic interests. The novel exploded on the conscience of America by demonstrating, in Wright’s words, how “[i]njustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.” In a searching analysis of the novel, the paper relocates the paradigms of class, race, ideology, and media in the context of the ‘American Dilemma.’ Against the vantage point of the current scenario, with the first black president Barack Obama firmly ensconced in the White House, the attitude and approach of the protagonist of Wright’s novel may seem an anachronism, in terms of racial dilemma, in the world’s most powerful democracy. But the fact cannot be ignored that even today, with statistics confirming that there are more black men in jails than in schools in America, Richard Wright’s pain and anguish have not lost their relevance.