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How did Richard Wright address racism in Native Son?

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Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry — African American literature Frontispiece and title page of *Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. The portrait on which the frontispiece's engraving is based is often attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an Black artist and writer who, like Wheatley, was enslaved and living in Boston.

In his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright addresses racism by highlighting the responsibility of white American society for the systemic repression of Black people. Rather than relying on sentimentality or moralizing, Wright employs a style of social realism to depict the life of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man living in a Chicago slum.123

The narrative explores how the environment created by racial antagonism shapes the protagonist's existence. After accidentally killing his white employer's daughter, Bigger’s flight leads him to a profound, albeit tragic, realization: he perceives the hostility of the white world as an intelligible force. Confronted with his own imprisonment, Bigger concludes that violence is the only alternative to total submission to a society that denies his humanity. Through this lens, Wright exposes the brutalizing effects of systemic discrimination and the limited agency afforded to Black individuals within an oppressive structure.241