Race, Morality, and Identity in Wright and Baldwin

Introduction: America's Foundational Moral Contradiction

The United States has always suffered from a fundamental identity crisis. Ideologically committed to the extension of an admirable set of values — most centrally those of liberty, justice, and human equality — its growth into a nation of incomparable prosperity was in many ways facilitated by its combined abundance of natural resources and a system of unfettered free labor known as the slave trade. As the Founding Fathers and framers of the U.S. Constitution began the charge toward independence from England, this contradiction became an issue of increasing importance, particularly given the moral implications of the fledgling democracy's new doctrine granting legal protection to those very values. However, a set of cultural, economic, and ideological divisions — especially as delineated by the regional gaps that would spark the Civil War — prevented the Constitution from having an immediate impact.

The Civil Rights movement a century thereafter would demonstrate that for the bulk of its history, the United States has claimed a deeply moral code of laws and ideals while more frequently engaging in a deeply immoral perpetuation of a racially oppressive and unequal system. This is a condition that defined the racial experience of Black Americans for much of the early and middle twentieth century, where white America's virulent exclusions would have a decidedly negative effect on the first generation of free-born Black Americans attempting to adapt to a changing nation.

As described in works by novelists Richard Wright and, thereafter, by James Baldwin, the immoral racialist fabric of American culture would manifest devastatingly in the lives of ordinary Black citizens struggling to adjust to a nation of new laws but many of the same lingering prejudices. The two authors approach this task differently, even though they were close friends and colleagues. To Wright, there is a fundamental sadism to the experience of American racism that manifests as a breakdown of morality for the Black man himself. To Baldwin, the response demands conscience, sensitivity, and moral self-assertion.

Richard Wright's Native Son and the Psychology of Disenfranchisement

As Wright conjectures, America's historical perpetuation of an institutionalized and virulent racism shaped the identity of the African American population in profound ways. Among the most fundamental consequences is a sustained disenfranchisement that deprived Black Americans of a national identity. This is the complex sociocultural disposition that drives Wright's Native Son. Understanding the novel's content and analyzing the suggestion of its title, one is inclined to believe that the lead protagonist and antagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a native of his homeland, the United States. Yet, paradoxically, Bigger is denied and alienated from that homeland throughout the story due to an immoral racial bigotry that places him in an isolated, lonely, and discriminatory society. This has the effect of shaping Bigger into an inhumane and violent figure whose absence of identity enables him to commit monstrous acts with relative indifference.

Wright does not take long to introduce, simultaneously, the miserable conditions of Bigger's life and the formative responses that have developed within him. In the opening sequence of the novel, Bigger and his brother are forced to hunt and kill an enormous rat while his mother and sister stand on the bed watching in terror. After succeeding in bludgeoning the rat to death, Bigger proceeds to dangle the dead vermin in front of his young sister, Vera. When Vera faints from terror, Bigger shows no sympathy or even awareness of his actions. His mother's anger is palpable as she charges at him: "Suppose those rats cut our veins at night when we sleep? Naw! Nothing like that ever bothers you! All you care about is your own pleasure! Even when the relief offers you a job you won't take it till they threaten to cut off your food and starve you!" (Wright, 12).

The job to which she refers — the position of chauffeur for a millionaire philanthropist — would ultimately become the forum for the true repercussions of Bigger's nature. Following a violent altercation with a member of his gang and his subsequent expulsion from the gang's hangout, Bigger finds himself forced to interview for the position. During the interview, the overwhelming fear he experiences upon his first exposure to the enormity of white wealth begins to reveal the source of his internal turmoil. The contrast between this lifestyle and that of his family brings into sharp relief the immoral social landscape that has shaped his world.

Bigger's brief tenure of employment for a wealthy white family invokes a change in him. The anger and inhumanity that had always guided his actions is now inflamed by a concrete target for his resentment. As Bigger drives his employer's daughter Mary and her communist boyfriend through the Black neighborhood, her disposition leaves him silently incensed. She speaks of the neighborhood with distant empathy, referring to its residents collectively to Bigger as "you people." Though he has no external response, it ignites his rage. Wright tells us that "there was silence. The car sped through the Black Belt, past tall buildings holding black life. Bigger knew that they were thinking of his life and the life of his people. Suddenly he wanted to seize some heavy object in his hand and grip it with all the strength of his body and stand in the naked space above the speeding car and with one final blow blot it out — with himself and them in it." (Wright, 70).

Bigger Thomas as Archetype: Racism, Violence, and Moral Distortion

The decidedly low value that Bigger appears to place on human life extends from the low value that had been applied to his own life, invoking one of the major psychological themes of slavery and the subsequent segregation of the mid-twentieth century. The notion that moral considerations were never meant to apply to the treatment of Black Americans precipitated, in Wright's work, the idea that the Black American had in turn been denied the opportunity to develop a sense of moral justice. Thus, for Bigger, anger becomes the channel through which justice is served rather than morality. He resents his family's dependency on him and his mother's constant disparagement. He has no meaningful opportunities, and his education and talents are modest at best. A glimpse into white lives — which appeared filled with a comfort and ease that juxtaposed grotesquely with the squalor and peril of Black lives — forced to the surface in Bigger an unwitting awareness that the affluence of one race precipitated the misery of the other.

Bigger's disposition speaks to a widespread condition among Black Americans in the years following abolition. Unbeknownst to Bigger, he is a product of an economy and political system that are both dramatically unequal. The focus Wright pays to the trials of this single malevolent figure reveals an unpleasant archetype — the type of man created by the moral disenfranchisement endemic to slavery and subsequent segregation. Jim Crow laws, which replaced slavery with segregation in the South following the Civil War, continued to channel explicit modes of racial hatred through public officials and legislative applications. Though the Civil Rights movement would bring greater clarity to the reality of Jim Crow — which promoted the exclusion of Black Americans from social, economic, and political participation in the white system — it would also intensify feelings of racial friction. Wright's 1940 novel seems to prefigure this in much the same way that James Baldwin's work would later resonate with the increasing activism of the Civil Rights movement.

In returning to the narrative of Bigger's life, we are given a startling demonstration of how extensively his condition served to remove him from a sense of his own humanity. The circumstances of Bigger's crimes, even if indirectly and through accidental misfortune, resulted in a series of gruesome acts that ended with Bigger accused of rape and a pair of murders — of Mary and his alcoholic girlfriend Bessie. Though Mary's death was not intentional, its circumstances proved unforgivable. If Bigger's malicious thoughts prior to the manslaughter were not sufficient to illustrate the resentment derived from his racial status, certainly the vindication he expresses afterward suggests his view of the act as being morally justified by sociological conditions. After the gruesome depiction of his concealing Mary's body in the furnace, Bigger contemplates his situation. Wright tells us that "he was conscious of this quiet, warm, clean, rich house, this room with this bed so soft, the wealthy white people moving in luxury to all sides of him — whites, living in a smugness, a security, a certainty that he had never known. The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as this symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of them, like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score." (Wright, 164).

This passage reinforces the concept that some equality of moral action has been perpetrated — not simply justifying Bigger's behavior, but even justifying the type of man he has become. His moral distortion was reflective of a morally distorted universe. This sense of moral equalization would not last long as Bigger constructs a poorly conceived plan to forge a kidnapping and extort ransom money from the family. It does not take long for his attempts to unravel, particularly when Mary's remains surface. Bigger's flight and subsequent brutalization of his girlfriend culminate in a violent gunfire exchange with police officers on the roof of an abandoned building in Chicago's Black Belt.

His incarceration, trial, and execution provide him with an opportunity to finally come to an understanding of his actions in relation to the racial circumstances that had delivered him into the world. He comes to understand that his divided identity had moved him through life engaged in a constant struggle for moral resolution. The rift between the American in him and the Black man in him was perpetually unresolved. Though there is redemption in the notion that Bigger is forced face to face with the causes and effects of his actions, Wright does not flinch from delivering a harsh resolution. As Bigger drifts from capture to execution, he laments the identity that had eluded him and hopes that in the next life it would be his from the onset: "A new pride and a new humility would have to be born in him, a humility springing from a new identification with some part of the world in which he lived, and this identification forming the basis for a new hope that would function in him as pride and dignity." (Wright, 275).

In his last thoughts, the reader finally glimpses a humanity in Bigger that is greater than fear or rage. There is a sympathetic emptiness penetrating him — the dark outcome of a wholeness he was denied by the combination of his race and his homeland. Bigger was human after all, but fully denied the opportunity to develop a moral sense of himself.

James Baldwin's Response: Conscience, Identity, and Resistance

On the threshold of the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin published Notes of a Native Son. Though his 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain would be perhaps his best-known work, it is this explicitly referential and dialogic follow-up to Wright's Native Son that would invoke some of the most compelling insights Baldwin had to offer on the subject of American racism. It is a lucid examination from the perspective of a deeply self-conscious writer enduring the twin burdens — in a nation of virulent prejudice — of being both African American and homosexual. The result is a collection of essays that reaches accord with Wright's conception of the socially devastating impact of segregation on the psyche, conscience, and real opportunity, while also taking issue with the brutality of Bigger Thomas — a decidedly negative image of the Black man in America.

In his own personage and in what he discusses, Baldwin proves a counterpoint to the figure of Bigger. A sensitive and saddened respondent to his circumstances, the "native son" of Baldwin's text is compelled by a deep sense of purpose to resist the implications that cut the character of Bigger Thomas down to something fairly inhuman. We are given something of his psyche when he notes that "any writer . . . feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent — which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important." (Baldwin, 4). Though in itself this sentiment seems not to directly concern the speaker's race, it implicates the America of Baldwin's experience as a cold and indifferent place. Where this turns a character like Bigger into a yet colder and more inherently cruel figure, it denotes in Baldwin a greater need for self-assertion and sensitivity.

We might think of Baldwin as a moral conscience and an ideological leader for the thinking, sensitive, and reasoning Black American, whose existence was generally obscured. But for Baldwin, this also presented a distinct challenge to his life and ambitions, for as he sought to express himself against the odds generally facing a writer, he did so also under the thumb of an America that hardly welcomed the types of insights he wished to provide. As Baldwin reports, "one writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation." (Baldwin, 7).

As to these dangers, they were certainly not merely theoretical. Baldwin was actively involved in the Civil Rights movement and cultivated friendships with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers alike. To witness each of these bold men assassinated for little more than the moral imperative with which they pursued racial equality was to reinforce Baldwin's prescient belief in the danger of his own declarations. And yet he would posit the ambitions of an intellectual "native son," drawing an ironic connotation upon Wright's text. This would denote something in the progress of the Civil Rights movement — as opposed to America's own moral posturing — which would become increasingly hostile when threatened with the deconstruction of its immoral system. With the ideological thrust of thinkers like Baldwin and his activist contemporaries, the push for change would also intensify.

Conclusion: Competing Moral Visions and the Path Toward Racial Harmony

The dispensation with moral prerogatives contrasts sharply with Baldwin's belief in the eventual achievement of racial harmony. He expresses this point within the framework of a Civil Rights movement increasingly serving to change the nature of the African American in social settings. He denotes that "I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." (Baldwin, 9).

This is an important sentiment upon which to resolve the discussion here, as it suggests not so much a rejection of the moral landscape of the United States but a belief in its capability to be changed for the better. To Baldwin, the nation would be in an apparent state of evolution and at a point of increasing readiness to accept the changes that were imminent. For Wright, composing his statement more than a decade prior, the perspective would be dramatically different. In Bigger Thomas, he would seem to lash out against the white establishment and charge it with the creation of a monstrous creature. Baldwin, by contrast, would hold a mirror up to Black America and demand it to respect what it saw in its reflection.

This pride and intelligence would help Baldwin's work to transcend Wright's — certainly important in its own time. Baldwin's would be the altogether more moral statement and one that would promote the type of harmony needed to place America on the moral footing proclaimed by its own lofty constitutional claims.

Works Cited

Baldwin, J. (1955). Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press.

Gilliam, F. D. (2002). Farther to Go. University of California at Los Angeles.

Wikipedia. (2009). James Baldwin. Wikimedia, Ltd. Inc.

Wright, R. (1940). Native Son. Chicago: First Perennial Classics, edition 1998.