ack then Negroes were treated as objects or animals. The word 'nigger' was the normal word for a black person. To be black meant you were someone’s property. Black people were not human and they were of little importance to the white man’s cause. But Huck Finn peers through the programmed views of discrimination and sees Jim as a person with feelings, personality, and over the course of the novel, Jim and Huck become like a family. They sacrifice their own needs to provide for each other. Black Boy is a story of the life of Richard Wright. Throughout the novel Wright is constantly exposed to discrimination. At the beginning of the novel Richard is four years old, living with his younger brother, his parents, and his grandmother who is bed-ridden. In a fit of mischief and spontaneity, Richard sets fire to some white curtains. The fire escalates, burning down half of the house. Trying to escape punishment, Richard hides underneath the house. When his father finds him, Richard is beaten almost to death and falls into a delirious sickness. Richard’s parents neglect him throughout the novel. They leave him alone at home and he has to fend for himself. The discrimination Richard’s parents show towards him in his early year effected the way he views the world as an adult. In chapter 12 while delivering a pair of glasses to a department store, the counter clerk - a Yankee - asks Richard if he is hungry. Uncomfortable and paranoid, Richard refuses to talk to him, answering the man's questions with lies. Richard even refuses to take the dollar that the man hands to him. What bothers him is that the man knew how he really felt, how hungry he was; Richard feels that the safety of his own life depends upon how well he is able conceal his true feelings from all whites. Richard’s isolation from the white world is directly due to the discrimination he encounters from whites early in his child hood. He learns early on that ...
