Vulnerable Youth in Richard Wright’s Protest Fiction

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Vulnerable Youth in Richard Wright’s Protest Fiction Claire E. Lenviel The twenty-first-century Movement for Black Lives Teaches us daily about the countless injustices of black vulnerability and, since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, the political power of that same vulnerability to organize protests, drive legislation, and unify a global coalition of antiracist activists. A litany of hashtags like “#drivingwhileblack” or “#walkingwhileblack” illustrates the vulnerable state of merely being black in the United States. Moreover, the disproportionate assault on young black lives—and the youth-led anti-racist movements that follow—exemplify how the age-and race-based vulnerabilities of black youth can be deployed for antiracist protest. Literary protest is no exception. Protest authors like Richard Wright recognized the political power of vulnerability long before our current moment. Interrogating the dialectic between Richard Wright’s protest fiction and the political discourses of the Roosevelt Administration reveals how Wright weaponized depictions of vulnerability by characterizing black youth as the most vulnerable population during an era of unprecedented federal accountability toward the welfare of American youth. The Roosevelt Administration framed national relief and recovery around a discourse of vulnerability with American youth, conceived broadly, as the intended recipients of federal protection. The power behind Wright’s protest lies not only in his tragic depictions of growing up while black during the Jim Crow era but in the discovery that these daily atrocities happened concurrently with a years-long, federal, multimillion-dollar effort to protect and support youth from the ongoing threats of the Great Depression. Wright’s protest fiction frequently depicted vulnerable and victimized black youth both as a form of literary protest and as a vehicle to stimulate protest among the public. Protest, as a political reality and as an artistic genre, used the atrocities of real life to engender civil unrest [End Page 121] and to employ that unrest for reform. Authors of protest literature during the thirties, from Langston Hughes and Marita Bonner to Theodore Ward and Richard Wright, often depicted young, black protagonists facing the conditions of economic exploitation, abject poverty, and racial violence to mobilize audiences. Characterized by a return to realism, an unapologetic critique of racism, and often a valorization of the masses, protest literature reinforced the cultural shift toward politically motivated civil unrest. Alfred Kazin and William Stott, for example, propose that writers of the thirties turned to documentary, not fiction, as the ideal form for offering a critically reflexive American consciousness. African American protest authors likewise demanded that “practitioners of democracy truly . . . live up to what democratic ideals on American soil mean” (Harris). They often employed real historical events or the genre of social realism as a mirror to reflect American injustice and the insufferable conditions of everyday life for the marginalized and exploited. Protest literature, then, is what Paul Lauter calls “a social dynamic,” one that allows an author like Richard Wright to position black youth as both marginalized by American politics and central to its reform (12). Protest, therefore, has always had a close relationship with vulnerability, for vulnerability serves as both the catalyst for social activism and the evidence of that activism’s necessity. Contemporary scholars of vulnerability agree with the term’s potential to critique dominant discourses, particularly as activists and authors like Wright translate it into political agency. For example, Judith Butler’s 2016 publication of Vulnerability in Resistance takes as its foundational given the feminist potential of recognizing how vulnerability exists within strategies of political resistance.1 In African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era, E. Lâle Demirtürk addresses the significance of revisiting vulnerability’s relationship to protest, particularly in the current era. Through an analysis of “racialized vulnerability,” Demirtürk “aims at revealing the black people’s transformation of the power of racialized vulnerability into a political strategy for social change to enhance democracy” (4). My work shares this objective, but where Demirtürk illustrates how black characters grapple with performative whiteness [End Page 122] through an interrogation of racialized vulnerability, I argue that Wright put vulnerability to a slightly different use. Wright used vulnerable black youth as an indictment...