By Naci Konar-Steenberg
I love reading books that were written a long time ago. Books like The Great Gatsby, 1984 and Flatland, even though their subject matters are all over the place, grab my interest for the same reason: they possess a character far enough removed from modern society to comment on it.
I felt the exact same way when I recently read Native Son by Richard Wright, but I felt something more. My hometown, Minneapolis, has gone through something of a cultural upheaval over the last several years, and it has demanded thorough evaluation of social structures often taken for granted. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the subsequent protests for racial justice has come a nationwide argument about themes that happen to be at the core of Native Son: the role of others and of society in the shaping of cultural identity, for instance, as well as the nature of moral outrage and panic, and society’s view of criminality. Not absent from this discussion, of course, is an argument about the ways in which majority groups talk about minority groups: specifically, how white people talk about black people.
With all this in mind, I sat down to read Native Son, hoping that the book’s eighty-year-removed perspective would in turn give me some perspective. The book centers around a young man, Bigger Thomas, who lives in poverty on Chicago’s South Side along with his family. They live in a one-room apartment in a tenement owned by one Mr. Dalton, a very rich white businessman who, apparently acting under a sentiment of noblesse oblige, offers Bigger a job working as his family’s personal chauffeur. Bigger, who despises the thought of working for Mr. Dalton but whose mother convinces him the family needs him to take the job, accepts. Mr. Dalton’s daughter Mary, a Communist, awkwardly tries to treat him as an equal, which makes him uncomfortable, and takes him out with her friend Jan (also white, also a Communist). Later that night, Bigger accidentally suffocates Mary to death, tries to pin the crime on Jan, and kills his girlfriend, fearing that she’ll tell the police that he killed Mary. He eventually gets caught, and the rest of the book illustrates him being sentenced to death for killing a white woman (the prosecution underemphasizes his murder of his black girlfriend) while he tries to make sense of what is happening to him and what he wants to do about it.
Throughout the book, Wright highlights Bigger’s consuming resentment towards white people and his dismal life prospects as a result of segregation. Ultimately, he presents Bigger as an angry anti-hero who is responsible for his own actions, though he has been influenced by social forces beyond his direct control. As I later learned, Wright received some pushback for this, and the book has had its share of controversy: some audiences didn’t like a book which, even though it was social justice oriented, presented its black protagonist as essentially a negative stereotype made human.
Wright’s goal was to break down and challenge assumptions one could make about his characters, as well as about the world. Yes, Bigger did act violently, but he did so feeling that the America he lived in essentially demanded it of him. Wright’s Communist characters are presented both as agents of good and as shortsighted people who cannot see the harm their good intentions are doing. (Wright himself was a Communist, but grew to think that the party line was too dogmatic, and eventually integrated aspects of existentialism into his philosophy.) Mr. Dalton, the book’s ‘white savior’, learns that he cannot undo three hundred years of oppression with donations of ping-pong tables to black-owned clubs.
Whether or not Wright successfully illustrated the dangers of dogma is of course up for debate (I personally think he did a very good job), but his writing serves a very important purpose in my opinion. Every day in our modern world, ideologues tell us that there is exactly one way to interpret the world, and that growing to fully empathize with another’s worldview (while not giving up your own) is dangerous and self-compromising. Even though Native Son was written eighty full years ago, I wonder if Wright’s point, seen through the lens of existentialism, could act as a perfect response to this sort of dogma. As Max, Bigger’s well-meaning but all-too-rational lawyer argues in the closing pages of Native Son, America promises its inhabitants ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, but curiously never defines happiness, assuming each will find their own. If this is the case, how can a country exist upon a foundation which denies this individualistic pursuit to anyone on the basis of collective identity, or even on any basis? If a society’s goal is that its inhabitants can create meaning in their own lives independent from external arbitrary restrictions, then one should feel comfortable with two individuals’ lives being different from each other. Two people don’t have to be the same, one doesn’t need to be easily definable by another, and the sooner we are fine with people doing different things from what society wants, the better.
There’s so much more I want to say about this book, but I feel like I’ve only really started to digest it — I’m still working to puzzle through its themes and untangle what it has to say about the world. It’s shaping up, however, to be a perfect example of why I love reading old books — they really make you think. If you know what I mean, or if you’d like to read Native Son yourself, make sure to head to your local library and crack open an old book yourself sometime soon. The author, the book, and a little bit of time will take care of the rest.
Naci Konar-Steenberg recently graduated from Saint Paul Academy and has lived in the Twin Cities all his life. He will be attending Oberlin College in the fall.