Blacks as "America's Jews"? Revisiting Black-Jewish Relations in Richard Wright's Native Son

While scholarship has recurrently focused on Richard Wright's Native Son as the paradigm of his black nationalist (read race), Communist (read class), or (anti-)feminist (read gender) ideologies, this essay contends that these three allegedly disparate discourses are linked throughout Wright's novel by the spectral figure of the Jew, who hauntingly traverses and, in so doing, subtly qualifies each of them. If Native Son does not idealize the historical black-Jewish convergence, nor does it seem to celebrate Jewishness as an inspiration for dealing with black oppression, rereading Wright's classic from the perspective of black-Jewish relations evinces the ambivalent race, class, and gendered attitudes that each group held toward the other at the time, ranging from black anti-Semitism to cross-cultural identification. The study concludes that the (non-)presence of the Jewish Other textually reproduces the very exclusions that Native Son is intent on criticizing, thus transforming the text into a critique of itself.