Black Boy No More?: Violence and the Flight from Blackness in Richard Wright’s Native Son

From Native Son forward, the desire to escape the No-Man's Land of blackness and achieve an apparently unraced manhood is characteristic of Richard Wright's black male protagonists. In his efforts to claim manhood, Bigger Thomas violently rejects black domesticity and the various modes of black identity presented in the novel. Thus, despite his similarities to the colonized subject as described by Frantz Fanon, we should not read Bigger as a model of revolutionary black manhood. And in rejecting blackness, no other identity is available to Bigger besides “nigger,” for manhood in the United States has never been unraced.