African American Lit Blog

Reading “Black Boys and Native Sons” was honestly a bit of an emotional experience for me. It sums up so much of what is wrong in the way that many people view Black people and people of color in general. Irving Howe’s piece is extremely racist and ignorant and is the embodiment of how many liberal white people view people of color. By writing about Native Son in the way he did, he ironically proved one of Richard Wright’s points.        I found a particular offence in the way that Howe reduces Black people to our suffering. He seems to think that Wright has somehow misunderstood the Black Experience. Race was a central theme of the novel, however, someone like Howe is so preoccupied with his ideas of black people that he is unable to see the Black Experience as anything but what he believes. I would be willing to bet that he is the type of person who would preach about equality but when confronted with actual racism he would disregard it. He is the type of person ...

One aspect of Invisible Man that I found really interesting was the way in which the n-word appeared in the text. The N-word has a long history and has had a huge variety of uses over time. I’d like to acknowledge that there is no way that I can discuss all of its uses and how everyone views the N-word. I wanted to discuss this more fully in a blog post because these topics can be difficult to discuss in class due to the demographics of the class.        Although used only a handful of tiems, the N-word has been employed throughout Invisible Man in almost every use of the word. It was used by the white people at the Battle Royal during the fight, in his dream about his Grandfather, several times by Dr. Bledsoe, and several times within the Narrator’s own narration. It was used in jokes and in the most viooently offesive and racist way. I found the instance with Dr. Bledsoe to be particularly interesting and, although we read that section a while ago, I have continu...