How we cite our quotes: (Section.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Yet when school let out that first day I ran joyously home with a brain burdened with racy and daring knowledge, but not a single idea from books. (1.1.266)
Richard is learning a lot of things at school all right. Too bad they’re not exactly the kind of things tested on the SAT.
Quote #2
I went to school, feeling that my life depended not so much upon learning as upon getting into another world of people. (1.5.3)
Ding ding ding! Finally, Richard gets something right. He only makes it to 9th grade, so he can’t get too far on his formal education alone. He needs to find a different way to use his talents.
Quote #3
Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far greater than my knowledge of fact. Though I was not aware of it, the next four years were to be the only opportunity for formal study in my life. (1.5.4)
Richard may not have much book smarts (yet), but he does have a lot of street smarts. Which kind of smarts does Black Boy end up thinking is more important?
Quote #4
I studied night and day and within two weeks I was promoted to the sixth grade. […] I told the family emphatically that I was going to study medicine, engage in research, make discoveries. Flushed with success, I had not given a second’s thought to how I would pay my way through a medical school. But since I had leaped a grade in two weeks, anything seemed possible, simple, easy.(1.5.46)
If Doogie Howser did it, why not Richard Wright?
Quote #5
Though I had never had any assignments from a college professor, I had made much harder and more prolonged attempts at self-expression than any of them. (2.16.5)
Even though Richard only gets four years of schooling, he tries harder than anyone else to learn and keep learning. We call these kinds of people "perpetual students" or "lifelong learners." They’re the ones sitting at the front of the class raising their hand all the time and ruining the curve for everyone. Remember that if you meet them in the wild.
Quote #6
"No, I know the masses of Negroes very well," I said. "But I don’t believe that a revolution is pending. Revolutions come through concrete historical processes... "
"You’re an intellectual," he said, smiling disdainfully. (2.16.190)
So, apparently "intellectual" means a person who uses reason instead of emotion. How’d that work out for you guys? We’re pretty sure we would have noticed in history class if there’d been a great Communist uprising in America during the Great Depression.
Quote #7
"If you know too much, boy, your brains might explode," a doctor said one day. (2.17.21)
First, we think this guy didn’t pay close enough attention during medical school. Second, white people around Richard keep telling him that education is dangerous. Dangerous for whom?
Quote #8
"Intellectuals don’t fit well into the party, Wright," he said solemnly.
"But I’m not an intellectual," I protested. "I sweep the streets for a living." I had just been assigned by the relief system to sweep the streets for thirteen dollars a week. (2.19.34)
Hm, seems like the lady doth protest too much. But what does Richard think an intellectual is? What does his unnamed questioner think about it? It seems like they might both have different definitions for the same word.
Quote #9
The heritage of free thought,—which no man could escape if he read at all,—the spirit of the Protestant ethic which one suckled, figuratively, with one’s mother’s milk, that self-generating energy that made a man feel, whether he realized it or not, that he had to work and redeem himself through his own acts, all this was forbidden, taboo. (2.19.366)
If free thought is as natural as a baby sucking milk, why is everyone so against it?
Quote #10
There had existed in Old Russia millions of poor, ignorant people who were exploited by a few, educated, arrogant noblemen, and it became natural for the Russian Communists to associate betrayal with intellectualism. But there existed in the Western world an element that baffled and frightened the Communist party: the prevalence of self-achieved literacy. Even a Negro, entrapped by ignorance and exploitation—as I had been—could, if he had the will and the love for it, learn to read and understand the world in which he lived. And it was these people that the Communists could not understand. (2.19.365)
Richard is a self-educated man, or, to be fancy, an "autodidact." We get why Russian Communists might be scared of him, but what is up with the American Communists? Didn’t this country practically coin the phrase "self-made man"?