Paul Weiss's Reviews > Native Son

“Why they make us live in one corner of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships …”

Bigger Thomas was not a nice man by any standards. Any reader, man or woman, regardless of their skin colour – black, white, red, yellow – would encounter significant difficulty thinking of Thomas in more charitable terms than the description penned by the “editor of the Jackson Daily Star, regarding Bigger Thomas’ boyhood there.” He wrote, ”Thomas comes of a poor [ ] family of a shiftless and immoral variety. He was raised here and is known to local residents as an irreformable sneak thief and liar. We were unable to send him to the chain gang because of his extreme youth.” A childhood criminal, in other words, who followed his destiny to a court trial facing charges as a sociopathic and unrepentant adult multiple murderer and rapist.

No reader will shed a tear over Bigger Thomas. How could they? No reader will have a moment’s sympathy for Mr Thomas. Nor will any reader empathize in any way with his plight. But, make no mistake. This is entirely as Richard Wright wanted it to be. When NATIVE SON readers turn the final page, it was always Richard Wright’s hope that any disgust, any dismay, any heartbreak, any sorrow, any embarrassment, any shock, any anger, any emotion at all that a reader might experience, would arise out of his portrayal and scathing indictment of 1930s white American culture. It was not intended to generate pious pity for the black people who were forced to endure that culture. Indeed, the wealth of the white Dalton family and their use of it in ostensibly helping the local black population in Chicago, which THEY saw as pitiable, was demonstrated to be nothing more than ostentatious, sanctimonious and self-serving. The metaphorical equivalent, if you will, of donating a few scraps of fish from time to time for a meager meal, while refusing to allow a black man the right to fish, denying him the ability to learn to fish, refusing to give him the right to own the equipment necessary to go fishing for himself, and forbidding him any access to the water in which the fish lived.

Wright’s portrayal of the nature, the depth, and the completeness of the racism systemic to white American Jim Crow culture in the early 20th century will assuredly take any reader’s breath away. But that hatred was not the only target at which he aimed his talent.

The anti-Semitism that some might have considered to be endemic in North American white Christian culture at the time demonstrated that Hitler’s WW II final solution and attempted genocide in the Holocaust did not happen in a global vacuum.

Fear of Stalin’s Russia and his brand of Communism led to the labeling of any variation of left-wing social thinking in America as Communism. Even those progressive thinkers who advocated for such things as minimum wages, de-segregation, or fair housing bought into the belief that they were espousing Communism. They willingly (and fearfully, I dare say) proclaimed themselves to be members of a North American version of the Communist Party. The continuing propensity of the hard-core right-wing in the USA to label the likes of AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as misguided, anti-American Commies did not happen overnight!

NATIVE SON is not an entertaining novel for even a single paragraph. NATIVE SON is a bleak and discouraging novel to read from start to finish. But it is instructive and informative, evocative and thought-provoking. The closing address to the jury by Jewish Lawyer, Boris Max, in which he pleads for mercy for his client and advocates for life imprisonment over execution is positively riveting. Whether it will be persuasive for any dedicated members of the modern right community who persist in their belief that blacks are a sub-standard variation of humankind is an open question.

Paul Weiss