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The Ossification of Hierarchy and Civil Disobedience in "Down by the Riverside"

  "Down by the Riverside" by Richard Wright illustrates how a White supremacist hierarchy is upheld by a number of social rituals that are repeated to such a degree that they become almost natural to those that participant in them, both Black and White to some degree. By arguing for the totality of the South's racial hierarchy, the narrative argues that the only real solution is mass disruption of the well-oiled machine through civil disobedience.  The story takes place during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Our protagonist, Mann, a Black man, seeks to take his pregnant wife Lulu into town to give birth, all while avoiding the forced labor on the levy that all Black people are liable to. His relative, Bob, provisions him with a boat stolen from the virulently racist Mr. Heartfield, and he makes his way into town. As Mann makes his way into town, he is able to navigate in an oddly free manner because of the darkness. Still, he is overjoyed to find "square of dim,...
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The One Where Shawn Once Again Connects A Work of African-American Literature to the Domestic Ideal

WEB Du Bois, in his theory of double consciousness, noted the tendency of oppressed groups to view themselves through the lens of the oppressor. Notably, he did not suggest that this was merely an arcane psychological preoccupation but an organizing principle of many of the institutions in the United States that sought to uplift the newly emancipated Black American during what this course broadly labels as the Reconstruction period. According to Du Bois, organizations like Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, embraced stereotypes of Black Americans as lazy and servile by exhorting them to focus on manual trades that would be useful to White Southerners instead rather than aiding them in developing an effective civic society and agitating for equality. In addition, Du Bois attacked double consciousness as perpetuating an elite, the teachers and intellectuals of such institutions, who believed that they differed from the rest of their race in having truer knowledge of their com...
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