Did “Cancel Culture” Drive Richard Wright Underground

Cancel Culture and The Man Who Lived Underground

Did “Cancel Culture” Drive Richard Wright Underground?

I. Black men face a lot of disadvantages in America because of their skin color.

1. They are racially profiled as criminals or bad people everyday by the criminal justice system.
2. The profiling is evident in Native Son and The Man who Lived Underground by Richard Wright as a case of “cancel culture.”
3. The Native Son is a story of a young black man, Bigger Thomas, who unintentionally murders the daughter of his white employers, disposes her body, and flees.
4.  The story centers of the nihilism that is produced by a virulently racist society.
5. The Man Who Lived Underground narrates the story of Fred Daniels, a black man who is arrested by police and falsefully accused of a multiple murder, beaten, and tortured until he signs a confession.
6. The fear of going to prison and the brutality he faces in their hands forces Daniels to move underground where he lives in sewers and cellars.

II. Canceling culture involves removing an individual from society without considering the reason they caused harm.

1. It leads to oppression and stigmatization of a group of people in a society.
2. The culture provides no healing or community-based solution, but punishes a person for deviating from the norm, for example, by being different or a member of a minority group, social capital, race or gender.
3. Canceling aims to confiscate people in a manner that holds them accountable for their actions, and get them out of their communities through shunning and shaming.
4. The canceling culture leads Officers Johnson, Murphy, and Lawson to interrogate Daniels without paying attention to his alibis and explanations while attributing deeds and motives to their captive.
5. The officers do not see Daniels as an innocent and authentic individual, but rather in a delusional theme of racism, as a guilty person.
6. Although Daniels is a church-going individual, mild-mannered, and a person of modest stature, the officers perceive him as delinquent, violent, and dangerous without proof, because of his skin color.

III. Wright, candidly tells how Black Americans have been victims of police brutality and intentional prejudice in the criminal justice system.

1. Daniels story of being tortured into signing a false confession for murder can be likened to the “Central Park Five” incident that became a prominent example of inequality, discrimination, and racial profiling in the legal system and the media (DeVylder et al., 469).
2. Daniels’ story follows the rampant use of deadly force, presumption of guilt, denial of due process, and the threat of lifelong prison sentences police apply to compel people to confess or cooperate.
3. It becomes difficult for Daniels to defend himself as the shock and outrage due to the false charges thrown at him.
4. He understands that any word he utters can be indiscriminately used against him, which makes him fail to refute the charges.
5. Innocence makes him unaware of the terms of the charges brought against him, which drives him to think craftily in relation to guilty terms.
6. Daniels’ identity is put into danger because law enforcement officers have resolved to identify him as a criminal.
7. The theme of confused identity runs throughout the story as at times, Daniel is mistaken for a store employee and a paying cinema customer.
8. The story of Daniels calls upon society to converse about the psychological stress minority communities go through when in the hands of the law enforcement officers.
9. Even when not presumed guilty, they are denied the due process of law, making them learn to think in terms of guilt if they must navigate the harsh false charges.

Richard Wright came to write The Man Who lived underground from personal experiences

I. Wright tells the story of Daniels in a manner that explains not only the experiences of his race with the police but also his painful experiences with the political left.

1. False accusations make an individual appear guilt and start to doubt themselves as ostracism becomes more pronounced.
2. In Native Son, the author narrates of how his grandmother accused him of bringing “devil stuff” in her house and slapped him across the mouth.
3. It is apparent that Wright’s life, even as a young man, was full of drama, which resembles what he tells in The Man who Lived Underground.

II. Wright turns racial profiling and police brutality into a lesson and uses it as a strength to liberate himself from agony, devastation, and shame.

1. Although Wright delves into the theme of false accusations, he does not refer to racial criminalization.
2. He uses the false accusations in his past life, which do not involve bigotry or police brutality, to draw parallels to what his characters go through (DeVylder et al., 470).
3. In the first instance, his grandmother mistakenly accused him of stealing biscuits, an indication that family members could not trust him anymore.
4. The second incident, Wright was accused without a cause, which built the emotional structure of The Man who Lived Underground, he was accused of something he had never dreamed of holding odd political notions as a member of a minority political party (Wright 2021, 206).
5. The incident involved Wright coming into conflict with the Black CP-USA leader Harry Haywood and said to have been guilty of Trotskyism between 1935 and 1937.
6. Wright became publicly viewed as a Communist since people saw whatever he wanted to say and even included in his work as negative.

III. Another relationship between Wright’s real life and his characters in both Native Son and The Man Who Lived Underground involves an oddity in the desire to maintain a distance from the CP-USA.

1. The experiences of Fred Daniels can be likened to what Wright had seen his friend, Herbert Newton undergo in the hands of police.
2. Newton had been physically abused by police for leading a protest of fired workers of the Works Project Administration (Butler, 91).
3. Following the incident, Wright publicly spoke about it and the New York Police brutality in the newspapers, but did not reference Newton.
4. The provocations Wright endured under the CP-USA led him to reorient himself to switch his writing projects to start penning The Man Who Lived Underground, an indication that his life experiences had influenced his writings.
5. Wright asserts that he had never written anything from sheer inspiration or expressed himself naturally than he did in The Man Who Lived Underground.

The relationship of The Man Who lived underground to society today

I. The Man Who Lived Underground is reminiscent of today’s corrupt legal system where officers try to coerce an individual to confess to a crime they did not commit.

1. The media’s involvement in escalating incidents involving falsely accused individuals is highlighted in the story.
2. The media accuses Daniels of being an escaped killer on the loose although his confession need not be legally admissible while at the same time the jewelry store worker who steals from the same vault as Daniels is not charged (Wright 2021, 65).
3. Just like other people of color and Hispanics, Daniels is criminalized in a manner evident of the dominant groups project and make illusions of bad behavior of people they deem different from themselves.
4. Although black men comprise about 13% of the male population in America, it forms 35% of the prison population (Bleich et al., 1400).
5. One in three black men and one in 18 black women are at risk of being incarcerated in their life due to the prejudice predominant in the American criminal justice system.

II. The story of Daniels represents the ways in which the history of oppression and racism keeps on manifesting in the America’s legal system and how the system continues to disparately treat the black people.

1. Black people have been a target of racial discrimination and historical social injustices since the Reconstruction Era, vagrancy laws, Black Codes, and convict leasing (Butler, 54).
2. The vices continue to this day as evidenced by the number of black people incarcerated due to drug-related crimes although the rate of drug use is similar across ethnic and racial groups.
3. Black people are more likely to be stopped and frisked by police compared to their white counterparts.
4. They are also at higher risk of being detained pretrial, sentenced harshly, or charged with more serious crime than white people.

III. Life in the underground means that Daniels cannot secure employment or take part in normal community activities like other people.

1. Just like in poor communities where racial disparities are high, employability is quite low as depicted by the life underground (Shakir, 168).
2. When a black person is suspected of a crime, they are stopped by the police, frisked, questioned, searched, and booked for crimes they have not even committed.
3. Police power is used to enforce administrative norms, for example, discriminatory restrictions of movements and searches (Butler, 76).
4. The law enforcement apparatus acts outside the law to uphold established social injustices, thereby denying minority communities their rights and enforcing subordination to others.
5. There have been instances of denial of political rights that are guaranteed by law with other circumstances involving police stand by as attacks are made upon members of minority races, groups, and ethnicities.
6. As indicated in The Man Who Lived Underground, law enforcement officers conduct investigations half-hearted if they involve members of the minority communities and are characterized by instances of false accusations and confessions.

IV. In Native Son, accusation of rape of white women by a black man leads to hatred by the white people.

1. Wright uses the characterization of Bigger as a violent person of color to show how white people view blacks (Istomina, 114).
2. Wright, himself, was brought up in a society that was oppressed and bred the circumstances he found himself facing.
3. Both Native Son and The Man who Lived Underground depict how blacks are accused of different crimes and how blacks know that even if they are not criminals or are opposed to the crimes they will still be suspects.
4. Bigger’s race and upbringing are used to highlight the reasons why black people make bad choices as they grow in black neighborhoods!
5. Bigger’s problems are compounded by his family’s lifestyles, for example, a mother who cannot cope with the unrealistic values placed upon her children, fatherlessness, and a sister who fears life (Wright 2016, 15).
6. Just like Daniels, Bigger is a tragic figure who represent the experiences of oppression in White America.

I. Therefore, Wright’s work in Native Son and The Man Who Lived Underground highlight how it feels to be ostracized and alienated from the society one has known their whole life.

1. Fred Daniels, like most Black Americans finds solace in the sewers that run beneath his city.
2. While living in the sewers, Daniels discovers a new life away from the social bondage that binds other people of color in America.
3. In the underworld, the restrictions and prejudice of the world above does not exist, which indicates the kind of life some people must go through in a country that prides itself of respect of human rights and dignity.
4. The issues presented in Wright’s works are somehow an indication of the life he has had to go through or some of his friends, for example, Herbert Newton who is brutally assaulted by police for leading a demonstration.
5. Wright’s grandmother mistakenly accused him of stealing biscuits, another evidence of writing his works from experience which erodes the family’s trust in him as the white society has in the black man in America.
6. As such, Wright’s works are an indication of the cancel culture which is rampant in the Western world.
7. The culture makes it difficult for people of color to navigate the hurdles life presents, for example, getting decent employment and being accorded fair trial in the criminal justice system.
8. Incidents of denial of political rights that are guaranteed by law are highlighted in Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground in addition to the circumstances involving police standing by as attacks are made upon minority communities (Wright 2021, 31).
9. Therefore, Wright’s works provoke a conversation about the tribulations of black men in the hands of law enforcement officers and how they are racially profiled as criminals and bad people every day just because the color of their skin.

Works Cited

Bleich, Sara N., et al. “Discrimination in the United States: Experiences of black Americans.” Health Services Research 54 (2019): 1399-1408. Print.

Butler, Robert. “Teaching African American Literature in Prison.” Journal of Ethnic American Literature 8 (2018): 28-131. Print.

DeVylder, Jordan E., et al. “Prevalence, demographic variation and psychological correlates of exposure to police victimization in four US cities.” Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 26.5 (2017): 466-477. Print.

Istomina, Julia. “The Terror of Ahistoricity: Reading the Frame (-up) through and against Film Noir in Richard Wright’s” The Man Who Lived Underground”.” African American Review 49.2 (2016): 111-127. Print.

Shakir, Mutaz Tarik. “Isolation and the Quest for Black Identity in Richard Wright Native Son.” Journal of English Language and Literature-JOELL 4.3 (2017): 165-170. Print.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. Random house, 2016.

Wright, Richard. The Man Who Lived Underground. Random House, 2021. Print.