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As some of you may or may not know, I moved to the US to continue my studies. And while I could say a million things about the cultural differences between New York and Florence, I will save my impressions for another time. Instead I’ll go over a book I had to read for today’s class.
Black Boy by Richard Wright is, in broad lines, a novel about violence and racism. It traces Wright's plight for freedom against southern White supremacist ideology which forced the African American population into a position of docility. The theme of division is felt both in the world outside of Wright’s home as well as within it. In many ways the violence he experiences at his grandmother’s house acts as a microcosm of southern apartheid violence. When Richard burns the house down at the very beginning of the novel, which portrays his early frustrations with his environment, his own mother beats him senseless: “I was beaten so hard and long that I lost consciousness”. Richard’s grandmother is a staunch Adventist who sees the world in duality: Black and White, good and evil, right and wrong, told as seen in religious texts. From this perspective Richard, too, comes to see the great divid, not only between the blacks and whites, but within all of humanity.
Why are people so divided? A healthy sense of self is built upon the realization that we are both unique as well as part of a collective, with its own collective norms. If we tip too far in either direction our personality will become distorted. While extreme individualism becomes anti-social, an over-identification with the collective leads to insecurities and conformity. And while ideally one tries to find a mean between the two, the Black person in Jim Crow America was unable to cater to the cultivation of the Self.
“We fall captive to the herd animal if we cannot reach the individual divinity in ourselves.” (Carl Jung)
Collectivism is a philosophical doctrine which believes that collectives are superordinate to the people within them. An extreme example can be seen within communism, the ideology with which Wright conforms at the end of the novel. Communism demands that its individuals sacrifice their property, well-being and life for what is considered the greater good.
Richard’s proclivity towards communism makes sense when one considers Arthur Schopenhauer’s observations regarding a similar matter around one hundred years earlier. Throughout the 19th century German nationalism was on the rise. Many people at the time molded their identity entirely around the German nation-state. He observed that those who were the most fervent in their identification as a German were the least powerful — those people in need of an identity to compensate for their lack of worth. “Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs. He is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Group identity offers a collective purpose to compensate for internal feelings of purposelessness and meaninglessness. Much like the German nationalists, Richard joined the communists in a final attempt to connect the chasm within himself. That which the world outside expected him to be, and the world within, the individual he wished to become, on his own terms.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, after some time he also becomes disillusioned by communism. He comes to view them as sheep who dogmatically assume they are right and that anyone who differs from their ideas, ideals and values are either wrong, evil or ignorant. Communism, which once promised Richard the glue needed to mend the division within the world, becomes yet another ideology polarizing society. Yet another “us versus them” doctrine.
By the end of Black Boy Richard seems to realize that becoming part of a group is only beneficial if we can still differentiate ourselves from them. If we can still maintain our independence and selfhood. When Richard leaves the communists he manages to maintain his individualism while still maintaining a solid foundation from which he can learn to grow. If he had stayed, and allowed the communists to shape and mold him into their ideal, he would have experienced a “melting away of the individual in the collective.” (Carl Jung) He would have regressed into a herd animal.
All in all, at twelve years old Wright already held "a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering" (p 87-88). Social progression depends on individuals such as Richard who are unafraid to differentiate themselves from the collective. Who are able to make choices about their destiny, not because they are expected of them, but because they expected them from themselves. By the end of the novel Richard was able to stand firm in his beliefs and values, despite the world around him still squirming with collective madness.