compassion and sense of fairness and justice. His autobiography does not try to paint all whites as evil or all blacks as good, but instead seeks to show how both whites and blacks suffer mightily by being on both the giving and the receiving of racist behavior and treatment. His message is far more humanistic than moralistic. He wants to touch the conscience of whites in the United States and hopes that they can change their racist attitudes and practices, but above all he wants to touch their hearts and their humanity. As he writes on the last page of his autobiography:
Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can't find its way to a human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain. . . (Wright, 1998, p. 453).
Wright's childhood is one of hunger and pain and poverty, abus
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