Much of the final 50 pages of Native Son is taken up with Mr. Max's testimony on behalf of Bigger Thomas who has now been found guilty of assaulting and killing a white girl and raping and killing a black girl. Mr. Max's defense is not based on Bigger's innocence, but rather the grander offense committed by the society in which Bigger lives, America.
I haven't even finished reading the section, but I had to stop in order to write down some of the things Mr. Max is saying.
"If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it in justice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which last for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. A common way of earning a living gives them a common attitude toward life. Even their speech is colored and shaped by what they must undergo. Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in its place with its own rights, needs and aspirations. What is happening here is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life."
It is not possible for a reader of this monologue in the 21st century to ignore the similarities between the society Max describes and our own. We cannot take for granted that political and social progress is inevitable, as this disheartening essay from The New Yorker's editor in chief, David Remnick, argues:
If we were ever naïve enough to believe that progress in political life is inevitable, we are experiencing the contradiction. Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that researches global trends in political liberty, has identified an eleven-year decline in democracies around the globe and now issues a list of “countries to watch.” These are nations that “may be approaching important turning points in their democratic trajectory.” The ones that most concern Freedom House include South Africa, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and, the largest of them, the United States. The reason the group includes the U.S. is Trump’s “unorthodox” Presidential campaign and his “approach to civil liberties and the role of the United States in the world.”
Listening to this essay one wonders how we let such a leader reach the White House. Native Son provides some of the context to the difficulties American society faces in terms of continuing racism, that Trump and his supporters seem unwilling to consider. How do we educate for understanding of oppression?
I think I need to study more Marx.
It is interesting to consider that Wright used a white man in the story to deliver this speech about the "Negro situation" to a judge who is repeated called "your honor". He wrote this in 1940, and much of his public would have been more sympathetic to a white man speaker (one with a long white beard, no less) than any black man speaking on his own behalf. Max (Marx??) is also Jewish - I wonder how that would have sat with readers who knew of Naziism and the Holocaust and other Fascist regimes. Perhaps they would have been more sympathetic to him, as a symbol of oppression which they had already recognized? I am trying to think about how Wright, himself a black man, was designing the mode through which his core message was communicated. I'll have to do more reading on this after I finish the book.
Now I'm returning to this blog 45 minutes later.
In light of the New Yorker essay on Trump's first hundred days in office, and the continued poignancy of Native Son, which is by far the most challenging book I've read in years, I think it's fitting to talk about how our own beliefs can guide us today. What do we believe in and think? As teachers? As Quakers? As white, privileged Americans?
Well, Jean Zaru speaks to the Quaker part. Here's how she conceptualizes a belief system, and I think it helps us realize that what we believe, we have to live:
“Many people want religion, but they want it in its place apart from their business, their politics, their luxuries and conveniences. My own experience is that religion cannot be lived except with one’s whole everyday life, and what cannot be humanly lived is not religion. Religion involves commitment and relationship, and relationship is action and engagement in the real issues of life. But there is no relationship without love, only waste, strife, madness, and destruction. Love makes it necessary to find the way of truth, understanding, justice, and peace. My kind of religion is a very active, highly political, often controversial, and sometimes very dangerous form of engagement in active nonviolence for the transformation of our world.”
I haven't even finished reading the section, but I had to stop in order to write down some of the things Mr. Max is saying.
"If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it in justice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which last for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. A common way of earning a living gives them a common attitude toward life. Even their speech is colored and shaped by what they must undergo. Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in its place with its own rights, needs and aspirations. What is happening here is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life."
It is not possible for a reader of this monologue in the 21st century to ignore the similarities between the society Max describes and our own. We cannot take for granted that political and social progress is inevitable, as this disheartening essay from The New Yorker's editor in chief, David Remnick, argues:
If we were ever naïve enough to believe that progress in political life is inevitable, we are experiencing the contradiction. Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that researches global trends in political liberty, has identified an eleven-year decline in democracies around the globe and now issues a list of “countries to watch.” These are nations that “may be approaching important turning points in their democratic trajectory.” The ones that most concern Freedom House include South Africa, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and, the largest of them, the United States. The reason the group includes the U.S. is Trump’s “unorthodox” Presidential campaign and his “approach to civil liberties and the role of the United States in the world.”
Listening to this essay one wonders how we let such a leader reach the White House. Native Son provides some of the context to the difficulties American society faces in terms of continuing racism, that Trump and his supporters seem unwilling to consider. How do we educate for understanding of oppression?
I think I need to study more Marx.
It is interesting to consider that Wright used a white man in the story to deliver this speech about the "Negro situation" to a judge who is repeated called "your honor". He wrote this in 1940, and much of his public would have been more sympathetic to a white man speaker (one with a long white beard, no less) than any black man speaking on his own behalf. Max (Marx??) is also Jewish - I wonder how that would have sat with readers who knew of Naziism and the Holocaust and other Fascist regimes. Perhaps they would have been more sympathetic to him, as a symbol of oppression which they had already recognized? I am trying to think about how Wright, himself a black man, was designing the mode through which his core message was communicated. I'll have to do more reading on this after I finish the book.
Now I'm returning to this blog 45 minutes later.
In light of the New Yorker essay on Trump's first hundred days in office, and the continued poignancy of Native Son, which is by far the most challenging book I've read in years, I think it's fitting to talk about how our own beliefs can guide us today. What do we believe in and think? As teachers? As Quakers? As white, privileged Americans?
Well, Jean Zaru speaks to the Quaker part. Here's how she conceptualizes a belief system, and I think it helps us realize that what we believe, we have to live:
“Many people want religion, but they want it in its place apart from their business, their politics, their luxuries and conveniences. My own experience is that religion cannot be lived except with one’s whole everyday life, and what cannot be humanly lived is not religion. Religion involves commitment and relationship, and relationship is action and engagement in the real issues of life. But there is no relationship without love, only waste, strife, madness, and destruction. Love makes it necessary to find the way of truth, understanding, justice, and peace. My kind of religion is a very active, highly political, often controversial, and sometimes very dangerous form of engagement in active nonviolence for the transformation of our world.”
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