What is the message in the poem "Between the World and Me" by Richard Wright?

Answer 1

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The poetic genius of Richard Wright captures with sublime eloquence the tragicomic plight of the African American existential struggle. Wright’s supreme gift in articulating the African American dialectical struggle to attain self-conscious personhood while traversing a landscape littered with the remnants of chattel slavery and darkened by the shadow of prejudice and injustice echoes deeply in the natural imagery of “Between the World and Me.” The continual struggle for African Americans to strive and yet not yield in the face of overwhelming obstacles present in the social, cultural, political, and economic matrix of the United States hints of a natural order of things – something that is perennial as the coming of spring yet as harsh as the brisk winds of a New England winter.

Being located in the betweenness of the “world and me” is a condition that has not only given rise to the literary eloquence of a Wright, but also influences some genres in African American thought and expression. From soul stirring spirituals to the jeremiad of African American abolitionists to the scholarly anxieties articulated by black intellectuals, the attempt to live the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice has been fractured by the painful and disturbing alienation brought about by the consequences of living in a society permeated by a virulent anti-black racism. It is in this abyss separating the ideal from the real where African American thought finds a critical ground.

With a backdrop of contradictory and conflicting impulses in the larger American society – the espousal of an unqualified freedom and equality while legitimating systematic economic, political, and social inequality and injustice – African American thought has had to come to grips with the inconsistency between the world and itself. This situation propelled the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, the political dynamism of Maria Stewart, the calculated words of Frederick Douglass, the intellectual prowess of Anna Julia Cooper, and the theological achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of these individuals sought to traverse the space that separated their self-understanding and that of the society in which they lived. They each attempted a heroic reconciliation of the diametrically opposing poles that marked their existence. Engaging the promises and perils of reason, religion, and race, these and many other African Americans sought to affirmatively answer the just query posed by Frederick Douglass as to whether “American justice, American liberty, American civilization, American law, and American Christianity could be made to include and protect alike and forever all American citizens in the rights which have been guaranteed them by the organic and fundamental laws of the land

Answer 2

Richard Wright Poem