NON-AFRICAN PROSE RICHARD WRIGHT: Native Son What is Max's attitude towards racial relations in the novel?

Answer Details

Boris A. Max, the communist lawyer who defends Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son, holds a clear and challenging attitude towards racial relations. He sees racism not as an accident of individual prejudice but as a systemic injustice that oppresses black Americans and corrupts the whole society.

Racism as a social and economic system. Max argues that the plight of black people is rooted in structures of power, poverty and exclusion. In his long courtroom address he contends that generations of oppression, segregation and denial of opportunity have created the conditions that produce men like Bigger. Racial relations, for Max, are relations of domination and fear that damage oppressor and oppressed alike.

Sympathy and understanding towards Bigger. Unlike the hostile white world around him, Max makes a genuine effort to understand Bigger as a human being. He listens to him, questions him, and tries to grasp the fear and hatred that shaped his life. Through this, he treats Bigger with a dignity that white society has always denied him, and he comes to see the accused as a symbol of countless oppressed lives.

A plea for social responsibility. Max's defence is essentially a plea that society examine its own guilt. He insists that to execute Bigger without acknowledging the racism that created him is to evade the real problem. He calls for recognition of black humanity and for change in the unjust conditions that breed violence and despair.

Limitations of his understanding. Yet Wright suggests that even Max does not fully comprehend Bigger. When Bigger finally accepts responsibility for his own life and finds a strange peace in it, Max recoils, unable to follow him into that awareness. This shows that Max's largely ideological view of race, though sympathetic, cannot wholly reach the inner reality of the man he defends.

Significance. Max functions as the novel's voice of social conscience. Through him Wright articulates the argument that American racial relations are diseased at the root and that justice requires transforming the society, not merely punishing its victims.

In conclusion, Max's attitude towards racial relations is one of critical understanding and protest. He views racism as a destructive social system, extends rare human sympathy to Bigger, and demands that society confront its complicity, even if his own grasp of Bigger's humanity remains ultimately incomplete.