Richard Wright- extra credit

Richard Wright’s “The Ethics if living Jim Crow” is about how the author learned all the different aspects of living as a black person through different experiences in his childhood.
He starts off by talking about his first house, it was over the tracks from the white neighborhood and paved with cinder. All the boys in the black neighborhood had cinder wars; they threw clumps of cinder at each other hiding behind their homes. Then the white boys challenged the black boys to a war only the white boys used broken bottles, which can leave cuts, all cinder does is leave bruises. From that he learned his first lesson in Jim Crow Ethics from his mom. These lessons continued as he tried to get a job in the only place he could, the white neighborhood. At his job there were two men who were supposed to help him learn about the job, but when he confronted them he was rejected in the utmost way. Then one of the men accused him of not saying Mr. in front of the others name and put Richard between a rock and a hard place. By denying he was calling the one a liar, by admitting he shows that he doesn’t have respect. It was this that caused him to leave the factory for good, right at that moment. In his next job he got caught staring at his bosses victim that he just beat, because she didn’t pay her bills on time. Walking home he was offered a drink and forgot to say “sir” after saying “no” and was pushed to the ground entangling himself in his bike, that had a flat. He was told he was lucky that it wasn’t someone else he offended because he would be dead. Then he got a job as a bell boy which he had managed to keep until he moved to Memphis, all with the help and teachings of his Jim Crow lessons. In Memphis he learned how to lie, cheat and steal and live the necessary double life of a black man. It has always been a “norm” to take your hat off when entering an elevator, especially if you were a black man. One day Richard had an armful of packages and stepped into an elevator that two white men happened to be in. he was unable to remove his hat and was visually scolded for it, and then one of the white men took his hat off and placed it on his packages. To avoid saying anything and admitting he was wrong and avoiding a possible beating he pretended to have some balancing issues with the boxes.
Basically Richard, who is the author and the subject, made it through his life by utilizing the Ethics of Living Jim Crow. These lessons started with his mom and he learned more and more in his work life. The lessons helped him make it through life with out to many problems.
These “lessons” really aren’t used any more in today’s society. We have evolved enough from the civil rights movements, that we have gotten past the idea that blacks, are inferior. Well most of us have there are a few people in the world who still believe in white power. Wright being a black man himself had an entirely different perspective of the story than if a white person wrote it from observation. Even though he is biased to people of his own race, he still gave a fair look at the situation.
I thought this was an interesting article; it reminded me of “Kindred.” This article reinforced all the stories from Kindred, a fictional sci-fi novel, and let me know that, that it was really like that back then.