The Politics of Reading Richard Wright: Black Boy as Ideological Critique

Humanism and poststructuralism constitute two dominant modes for engaging Richard Wright's Black Boy While ostensibly very different theoretical frameworks, both privilege the aesthetic dimensions of Wright's discourse and consequently displace the political concerns of Wright; in other words on the contemporary scene Wright has de-politicized. This essay recovers Wright's politics, specifically his materialist understanding of race. I demonstrate how Black Boy articulates a critique of (racial) ideology and consequently demystifies the notion that is a biological entity. As Wright puts it in a 1953 interview [r]ace is a social myth, not a biological fact (An Interview 156). I argue that Wright's ideology critique of opens a space for what I call transformative theory--a theory committed to social change. In this postmodern moment it is commonly held that is a social construction. If is a social construction and then why does it translate as a biological entity in the cultural imaginary? This is the precise task of ideology where the aim is to translate the social into the biological. As Louis Althusser argues ideology is representation of the relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence (162). Thus ideology is a set of discourses, images, myths that establish an relationship between the individual and the world. Imaginary does not mean that this relationship is non-existent (false) since people do indeed live their lives according to these imaginary relationships with their world. By I mean that one occupies a subject position from which one assumes a relationship of and fullness. Wright shows how ideology constitutes Euro-American subjectivity into an position through discourses that negate African-American subjectivity. The invisibility of African-American subjectivity provides a sense of for Euro-Americans and I call this invisible presence. By invisible presence I mean that African-American subjectivity provides for dominant subjects, and this secures the reproduction of the free subject, an entity essential for free market capitalism. At the same time this ideological production depends upon the invisibility of African-American subjectivity. Black Boy then, operates as a political intervention to make visible the invisible, and consequently denaturalize the social and point up its historicity. The exploitative racial formations are historical and cultural constructions, and Wright articulates ideology critique to expose the social forces which construct the real and produce social inequality. In many respects Black Boy functions as an allegory on US relations. For example, as a four year old, Wright is resentful of being neglected by his family (4) and this familial mirrors the neglect that blacks experience within larger US society. In other words, the text provides a local site for the articulation of translocal issues such as racial oppression and exploitation. Wright speaks for voiceless negro boys because he, like other blacks, has been thrust out of the world because of [his] race (338). Wright engages problematics of but unlike much of contemporary theories of race, say in the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stuart Hall or Cornell West, Wright links the ideological production of difference to its material infrastructure. In an interview Wright foregrounds the materiality of race: We are cheap labor [and] this is the basis and the reason for the 'Negro problem' in the United States. Everything has woven around this truth (Two Hours ... 95). In what follows I foreground this basic truth by illustrating Wright's practice of ideology critique. Specifically, I articulate a symptomatic reading which engages three exemplary moments of ideology critique in Black Boy, moments which reveal that is an historical and cultural construction which mediates/reproduces class relations. …