HUMAN WASTE DOWN THE SEWER: THE RACIST ABNORMALITIES OF US LIFE IN RICHARD WRIGHT'S THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND.

Abstract

This article examines the mechanisms that white supremacists apply to conceive of Black people as human waste, and the strategies to counteract them, in Richard Wright’s 2021 posthumous work The Man Who Lived Underground. The novel narrates the story of Fred Daniels, a young African American man who suffers the harshest aspects of Black life in mid-twentieth century New York City. Leaving work on a Saturday evening, Daniels is arrested on the street by three white police officers, and severely brutalized at the police station. Falsely accused of murder, and forcefully transformed into human waste, the protagonist manages to escape to the sewer system of the Big Apple, undergoing a surreal experience amid the filth and darkness of the tunnels that makes him ponder on the abnormalities of aboveground human relations.