#native son

Always there is something that is just beyond the tip of the tongue that could explain it all.

Changing it up again this week! "Native Son" (1940) by Richard Wright is the story of Bigger, a poor black man in the South Side of Chicago in the 1930's. Wright uses the novel to explore how much hatred and oppression a people can stand before they break.

This is not a light read- trigger warnings for assault, rape, sexism, and racism. We're highlighting it because Wright uses this work to thouroughly critique respectability politics- a strategy championed by Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century which encouraged minorities, specifically black people, to be "respectable" to prove to white people they were worthy of equality. Respectability politics is still deployed today in neoliberal rhetoric which holds minority groups responsible for their behavior and the "bettering of themselves" without considering socio-economic factors that disadvantage groups.

We highly reccomned giving this novel a chance, it is both an excellent insight into our time, and a way of better understanding the historical forces which still impact our modern oppressive systems. This novel is an especially good insight into the legacy of slavery and white supremacy in the early USAmerican communist movement.