The Ethics of Living Jim Crow is an autobiographical account of author Richard Wright's education in race relations in a totally segregated south. Wright talks about his experiences growing up in the south and the racism he encountered. He attempts to show us what being on the receiving end of racism is really like, and the lessons he learned from them. I believe that Wright's intended audience seems to be directed towards white people so that they may gain an understanding of the hardships blacks went through early in our nations history.

Wright starts off by explaining where he grew up. The house he lived in was located behind the railroad tracks and his "skimpy yard was paved with cinder blocks" (600). To see green you had to look beyond the railroad tracks to the white's section of town. I felt that here the author seemed to know that there was a difference between the two, but at his young age he did n

In the first part of the article Wright describes a fight that he gets into with some white boys and the punishment he receives from his mother for it. His mother tells him that he is "never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again" (601). She goes on to say that he should be thankful that the white kids didn't kill him. I think that in telling Wright this, his mother is teaching him that blacks are not as good as whites and that he should be thankful that they allow blacks to exist in the same world as the whites.

The last part of the article describes how blacks felt about the way they had to live. A friend of the author summed it up by saying, "Lawd, man! Ef it wuzn't fer them polices 'n' them ol' lynch-mobs, there wouldn't be nothin' but uproar down here!" (610). With this, I believe, the author has come to the realization that when it comes to racism, the blacks in the south knew about it, received it frequently, and came to accept it an

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Approximate Word count = 651
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)