Flowers

Eric Flowers

Dr. Young

EN 411

15 February 2005

Implanted Truths

         For nearly two centuries, from the first time a slave ship touched land, until the 1960’s, the only voice heard in the United States was that of whites.  Those that were of a different race, particularly blacks, were relegated to nearly complete silence.  With very few exceptions, such as Frederick Douglass, black men and women idly sat and lived their lives without voicing the truths of race and race relations.  One of the first writers to challenge the social problems that were attached with race was Richard Wright.  Wright’s autobiographical novel, Black Boy, was a ground breaking work that sought to shed a light of truth onto what it truly meant to live in America.

        Richard Wright uses his novel to assert his full belief that there is no inherent identity to a person based solely on his or her skin color.  Instead, Wright pushes forward his full belief that any and all ideas that are attached to race are based on a cultural ideology.  That is, ideology as defined by James H. Kavanagh.  In his piece, “Ideology,” Kavanagh stresses ideas that are labeled as normal, such as race or even gender relations, are actually constructions of a culture’s larger institutions (institutions being mass media, churches, schools, etc).  Kavanagh clearly states this as he says, “… ideology designates a rich “system of representations,” worked up in specific material practices, which helps form individuals into social subjects who “freely” internalize an appropriate “picture” of their social world and their place in it,”(Kavanagh 31).  Right along with this line of thought, Wright sought to bring to the forefront the notion that it is the ideology of America that shapes the so called truths attached to not only blacks, but every race. Like Richard Wright, I fully agree and declare that the ideas that are attached to all races are mere ideological constructions.  I fully believe that the ideology of America, pushed by large institutions, creates a non-inherent belief that people of differing skin colors are also inwardly different.  Furthermore, I do too propose that their must be a societal change for this ideology to be displaced, but unlike Wright, I do not propose Communism.  Instead, I propose a nonviolent up rise of sorts that will point out the stereotypes that the American ideology creates.

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        Richard Wright does not open Black Boy with any kind of declaration against American ideology.  Instead, he shows his readers that he too was born into a world that dictated what he felt towards other races as well as his own.  As a young child, Wright does not inherently know that there must be differences between him and the white people he sees every day.  This is best shown when, as a young child, Wright can not understand the outrage of the blacks around him concerning the beating of black child at the hands of a white man.  Speaking of this ...

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