How genuine is the Brotherhood’s cause?
We are first introduced to the Brotherhood when the narrator is given the opportunity to speak in front of crowds for the first time since he was young. He speaks about real issues facing the black population all throughout America, and he believes he has finally found his purpose. That is, until the Brotherhood takes a disliking towards his style of speeches and intervenes. At his most successful speech, he decides to go off-script, and aims for an emotional response from the crowd, unlike the Brotherhood’s supposed factual, straight-to-the-point style that the narrator is supposed to take on. While he is very successful in connecting with the crowd, afterwards, it is shown the Brotherhood did not like the path he was going down. Shortly after this speech, he is sent away to talk about women’s issues (out of the blue), for what he knows to be fabricated reasons. With that being said, why would the Brotherhood reassign him when he was doing better than ever? If the Brotherhood really w...
I think that one of the points here is that there is no such thing, in Bigger's world, of what we would call a "normal" interaction with white people: he is always aware that he is under a kind of spotlight, that there are all these rules he has to follow, and his self-consciousness is acute during the entire interview with Dalton (which, on the surface, is entirely friendly and benign). It makes no difference whether or not we consider Dalton himself "racist," either in his business practices or his personal interactions, because this context of racism is deeply built into the dynamic from the start. In some quite literal sense, Dalton primarily exists in relation to Bigger in a *structural* sense.
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