“Your Honor, this Court and those troops are not the real agencies that keep the public peace. Their mere presence is proof that we are letting peace slip through our fingers. Public peace is the act of public trust; it is the faith that all are secure and will remain secure.”[1]

In the Foreword of Native Son, author Richard Wright[2] tells why he chose to portray his main character in such brutal and chilling fashion. Richard Wright grew up in the Deep South. His grandparents were slaves. His parents were share-croppers who scratched a poor living from the soil, completely enslaved by socio-economic circumstances beyond their control—circumstance won by unlucky birthright and enforced by one Jim Crow.[3]

In the afterword, John Reilly shares his view that Richard Wright shows us “the way it feels to be imprisoned by the social facts of life in America.”

Richard Wright felt the burning racism of his day and he despised it. Native Son makes racism impossible to ignore. It’s all there. The red-lined neighborhoods[4] confining racial groups to squalid homes and imprisoned futures, the care-worn mothers, the bewilderment, the rats, the disease, the loneliness that White condescension guarantees, the youthful energy that implodes—crushed by its own inertia, the full-fledged awareness that something very big is wrong and the clear realization that nothing in God’s green earth can fix it. It is all there in Native Son. It simmers and roils in hot and endless currents beneath the torrid, brutal reality of Wright’s saga—the sad short struggle of a very bright boy name Bigger Thomas.

The conversation must happen. We must speak to each other and have this conversation. Something very big is wrong and we must realize that it can be fixed. But first, we must speak about it—to one another.

Our world today is not a “post-racial”[5] society as some assert. So we must go and find the conversations, and listen, and speak—so that we can achieve the true brotherhood and sisterhood that our greatest heroes have shown us with their dreams. They did not dream in vain. They did not teach in vain. We are here, and we are talking about it, as they would wish. Uhuru!

Image: Richard Wright (1908-1960), portrait by Carl Van Vechten is in public domain but the artist’s estate asks that it will not be altered, colorized, cropped, etc.

[1] From Book Three of Native Son by Richard Wright. See: Amazon, Powell’s or my favorite, Wallace Books in Portland: https://www.facebook.com/wallacebooks

[2] See: http://www.biography.com/people/richard-wright-9537751 “I want my life to count for something,” he said.

[3] See: http://newjimcrow.com/ by Michelle Alexander (the institutional, systemic racism that maintains inequality, e.g. segregation and mass incarceration, still prevalent in America)

[4] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Segregation

[5] A term used to imply that Racism is “cured” in America and to justify the roll-back of important voting rights laws