Post # 3

What really struck me about this week’s readings was the question of black humanity. On page 184 in Black Boy Richard talks about the problem of acting human around whites “I would remember to dissemble for short periods, then I would forget and act straight and human again, not with the desire to harm anybody, but merely forgetting the artificial status of race and class.” So basically Richard concludes that in order to stay out of trouble he must act inhuman, like an object. Whites hate independence in blacks and probably hate indications of humanity (laughter, sadness, etc.) because the only way they could continue to treat blacks as less than human would be to juvenilize and trivialize the humanity of the blacks. And eventually they seem to succeed at suppressing the emotions that make Richard human. Richard decides he had “developed, slowly, and painfully, a capacity to contain it within myself without betraying it to any” (he’s talking about his tension, his nervousness around the whites). The self-discipline the blacks had was astounding. But I looked up online the average life expectancy for blacks and whites and discovered that whites have always lived longer on average than blacks (at least in this country). I’m sure there are economical reasons for this but I suspect that bottling up emotions to an insane degree must create such a terrible stress on a person that they can’t possibly be as healthy as a person who can live more freely.

When I first was reading Black Boy I hated Richard’s family for the way they beat him almost without reason (similar to how the whites threw a glass bottle at Richard because he didn’t use the word “sir”). I felt like there was something lacking in these adults⎯it seems almost inhuman to beat a mere child and chastise him for just existing (such as when his mother slaps him for asking so many questions). But the I remembered that I had seen on T.V this housing development a very wealthy black man was putting together in New York City. He allowed poor black families to rent brownstones for really low rates and provided them with a community center and some other useful services. What he found was that these parents had no idea how to raise their children so gave new parents counseling when their children were first born and realized this was the only way to break the cycle of physical abuse handed down from one generation to the next. So I guess I look at the adults with pity rather than contempt because they really didn’t know any better⎯a sense of morality has to be learned from some place.