Macon and Bigger

We talked briefly in class about how Mansbach references many key works of African American literature and I want to analyze one reference to Native Son by Richard Wright in a bit more detail. This post might be more interesting if you were in the African American Lit class or have read Native Son on your own, but I’ll give brief summaries so hopefully the post is understandable even if you haven’t (although there might be spoilers if you think you will read the books).

In the prologue, Macon brags about his news coverage and says “I was hoping someone would call me the white Bigger Thomas, but nobody had the nutsack even though it’s an obvious comparison, what with Bigger being a chauffeur and me being a cabbie. I talked a lot more shit than Bigger ever did, though. And I did what I did on purpose. And I got away.” Bigger Thomas is the main character in Native Son by Richard Wright. In the novel Bigger (a black man) accidentally kills a white woman, tries to run away, and is then tracked down, tried, and sentenced to death.

Macon comparing himself to Bigger is really strange. A huge point of Native Son is that Bigger is forced towards his fate through lack of opportunities and options in his life. But Macon’s whole deal is that he chose to talk and think about race even though because of the privilege of his whiteness he wasn’t forced to. Macon even emphasizes that he acted “on purpose” as a contrast to Bigger.

Maybe after the riot, the idea of fate becomes more relevant for Macon since we see him spectacularly fail at his attempts to change the way white people think about race. Macon’s attempt to revert to complacency in white privilege show the limitations of his ability to combat this privilege. But this limitation is really different from the limitations Bigger faces. In any case, since Macon is talking about news coverage mostly related to the robberies and the media doesn’t even know about the change in his outlook after the day of apology, it wouldn’t make any sense for Macon to expect the media to compare him to Bigger Thomas for anything other than the robberies.

Maybe Mansbach is trying to highlight Macon’s failures of understanding by showing the shallowness of his grasp of Native Son. In class we talked a lot about how Macon tries to make white people more aware of the effects of their race by telling them to simply reflect whereas Macon’s own awareness came from intense study of black people’s perspectives. We concluded that Macon’s movement (If you can call it that) might have been more effective if he had told white people to learn from other people instead of reflecting. If Macon didn’t actually understand what he read, I’m not sure how it would affect this dynamic or what point it would serve in the narrative.

I think Macon is doing what we see him doing at other points in the book – comparing himself in a very flawed way to someone who is way more important to the history of ideas about race than he is. But I’m not really sure what exactly Macon or Mansbach is going for with this reference and I’d be really interested in your thoughts.