Crafting Creative Concepts with Charlotte

Communism is a hard thing to understand in Native Son . Bigger's interactions with communists create some of the oddest scenes in the novel. At the hands of communist characters we get the car scene with Jan and Mary, who think they are aware of racial oppression and doing the right thing to combat it while actually making Bigger horribly uncomfortable. We also get Mr. Max, an incredibly intellectual and articulate man who has arguably the best understanding out of any character we meet of what made Bigger who he is and of the scale of institutionalized racism in America. So this makes us think: which one of them is the more realistic communist? Well, Richard Wright modeled numerous aspects of Native Son after real-life experiences that he had. It turns out that all this contrasting behavior we see from communists also reflects his personal experiences. Wright aligned politically with the far-left his entire life, and was actually in the Communist Party for about 10 years, writin