Race Class Gender and Power

¶ … Harlem Renaissance was a true flourishing of African-American arts, music, and literature, thereby contributing tremendously to the cultural landscape of the nation. Much Harlem Renaissance literature reflects the experience of the "great migration" of blacks from the rural south to the urban north. Those experiences included reflections on the intersections between race, class, gender, and power.

Many of the Harlem Renaissance writers penned memoirs that offer insight into the direct experience of racism, such as Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow." Poets worked with classic literary devices like symbolism and imagery to convey the intense emotions linked to experiences of prejudice and violence. Emerging in conjunction with social and political justice movements such as women's rights and labor rights, the movement to empower black communities through the arts also spilled beyond the borders of the African-American community. For example, F.

Scott Fitzgerald's novels and short stories addressed class conflict and income disparities. Works that comment on social injustice, income disparity, and class conflict comprise the zeitgeist of the time. In the second section of "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," Wright writes about a shocking scene of violence that was all too common in southern black communities: "One morning, while polishing brass out front, the boss and his twenty-year-old son got out of their car and half dragged and half kicked a Negro woman into the store.

A policeman standing at the corner looked on, twirling his nightstick." This one poignant image encapsulates the spirit of Wright's work, as it reveals the way racism became fully entrenched in American society. The police officer simply looks on, "twirling his nightstick" rather than intervening, showing that racism was indeed institutionalized and practically upheld by the law -- hence the Jim Crow "laws" that somehow evaded oversight from Washington.

Although Jim Crow violated every single tenet upon which the nation was founded, it was the only political and social institution in the South for generations. By enforcing Jim Crow, the sacred institutions of the nation including its justice system ensured that African-Americans could not have access to social or cultural capital, let alone financial capital. Thus, race and class became inextricably entwined.

In "Bitter Fruit of the Tree," poet Sterling Brown also uses an anecdotal format to describe the experience of discrimination and the way it impacts social class and access to power. The poet reflects on his grandparents' generation and the way they had been taught to be submissive to the white power authorities. Just as Wright discusses the systematic racism in American society through his experiences, Brown shows how blacks had been told, "You must not be bitter," as if they should just accept racism as a part of life.

Brown answers the question Wright asks in "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," "How do Negroes feel about the way they have to live?" in the final line of "Bitter Fruit of the Tree," when the poet writes, "my brother is bitter, and he does not hear." Bitterness and overall mistrust of the white power establishment is the only natural outcome of systematic racism along the lines that Wright and Brown illustrate in their work. As a poet, Brown relies more heavily on symbolism than Wright does.

Wright's work is more literal, direct, and straightforward as he relays actual anecdotes from.