Forbidden to be White

Writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Waldo Ellison, and Flannery O’Connor do an excellent job conceiving characters who “had discovered years before that they were [not] white… and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be,” (as written by Toni Morrison in Sula). These characters encounter situations dealing with racial repression and use these experiences as support for stronger wills.
Richard Wright’s excerpt from his book Black Boy introduces him as a young man, working in an optical factory. He says that, “It had been a routine day, a day more or less like the other days I had spent on the job…I was at peace with the world, that is, at peace in the only way in which a black boy in the South can be at peace with a world of white men,” (1317). Richard has to carry himself in a very distinct and disciplined manner for the sake of keeping his job under a white employer. His definition of “peace” ...