Considerations regarding the character and the author

As we may already keep in mind, Richard Wright is an author who, even though he died more than 60 years ago, still remains with us in the current days. The author brings us quite pertinent questions, some of them having historical origins.

In works such as Native Son, we are brought a portrait of a society that divides a city into two different parts, isolating minorities and progressively hindering their social integration in 1940s America and the rise of their members in society at large.

With works of the same caliber as Black Boy, we receive a reliable first-person portrait of the true meaning of being born with black skin in the United States and the difficulties that a man with different skin color has in his life.

We also have a close picture of the great instability that was experienced at that time in the southern United States, where justice was nonexistent for the black community. Whites carried the mentality of Confederate times, reflecting on their actions on blacks, especially in what concerns to murders and lynchings.

Black Boy can also be seen as a book full of feminism applied to the case of black women, since the work shows us the hardships that Richard Wright's mother goes through as a single mother after being abandoned by her husband to whom justice gave reason instead of providing support to her as a mother who had to raise two children by herself.

The Man Who Lived Underground offers us an insight into the issue of police abuse under the Afrodescendant community and other minorities, an issue that, for many years to come, never loses its timeliness. As a martyr, Fred Daniels represents the black man who is attacked and wronged, often in summary form. This work shows us a brutal and limitless performance of a police force that proves to be uncompromising and corrupt, not looking at the means to achieve its ends. The work portrays in the background a police officer whose agents do everything possible and impossible to have their prizes and to get a good reputation for having solved certain cases. The work becomes actual when we compared Fred Daniels, a character from 1942, with real and recent cases that still populate the Media’s collective memory. We have the most mediatic case of George Floyd, the case responsible for rekindling the media's attention on racism and xenophobia.

Recently, on August 31 this year, we had a case posted on Instagram about the case of Donovan Lewis, a 20-year-old black man who was shot in his own bed by the police, with no opportunity to defend himself.

The news says that the police were called by a complaint of domestic violence (and with arrest order), but what we can verify in the video released is that the police acted in summary, without giving the man a chance to defend himself.²¹

If we combine The Man Who Lived Underground with Native Son, we get a picture of the

"tokenism" present in North American society, where rich white people do showy solidarity actions just to show newspapers that they are allies. However, we see that they perform really false actions which happen only in extreme situations. It is the case of George Floyd.

American comedian and activist Jon Stewart does speak to us on this issue of “tokenism" in an episode of his show The Problem With Jon Stewart. It is a segment in which he addresses racism and the excess of politicians who are surprised by situations and campaign against racism, although doing actually nothing.

"White people are pretending that this problem is new.

and we're just hearing about it now, because we love to discover stuff that's already existed. It's kind of our thing.

"America, where did you come from?" "First!"²²

As a protagonist, Fred Daniels is very interesting in his own existence as a character. It's quite interesting the whole journey of self-knowledge and discovery that the Richard Wright's tragic hero goes through in the plot, through the adventures he has in the three days he spends underground.

Even so, the innocence-filled personality that Fred Daniels maintains in the actions he performs in light of his discoveries is curious. Despite having a noble desire to remove his community from the segregation that binds her, Fred forgets that it is quite difficult to do so immediately, facing the cops with the evidence he has at the moment when he is more vulnerable than he thinks.

In general, The Man Who Lived Underground is a work that, because of being published at a very recent time, can change people's perceptions about the difficulties of the African American community in a world that, despite the legislative and cultural advances we have already had, persists in being racist and divisive. Fred Daniels is a simple character who goes through a simplified storyline with no big twists and turns. Black Boy can be seen as a good complement to The Man Who Lived

21 Blvck paper on Instagram. Instagram. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2022, from https://www.instagram.com/reel/CiANfmPjadW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

22 YouTube. (2022, March 25). The problem with white people | the problem with Jon Stewart | Apple TV+. YouTube. Retrieved October 18, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu27WJ0Axcw

Underground, because it gives us a more complete perspective on segregation from the point of view of those born within a time when the country lived periods of recurrent violence within minorities.