Wright’s peasant Southern origins gave him a distinct route into Marxism.

Evidence

But there were also others in whose work a similar contestation could be discerned; others emergent from Black societies and in search of an articulated opposition to Western racism and bourgeois society. One of these, Richard Wright, is of particular interest. Unlike those upon whom we have already focused, Wright was not of the petit bourgeoisie. His roots were in the Black peasantry of the American South. His encounter with Marxism and the Communist movement was largely unmediated by the cultural misdirections that accompanied the intellectual awakenings of middle-class Black men and women. His childhood and adolescence in Mississippi, subject to the most direct exposure to racist brutality and brutalization, provided him little appreciation for or expectations of bourgeois society and its culture. He came to Marxism for reasons that were fundamentally different from those of our previous subjects. And when he withdrew, he was different too. His insights into his experience of the Communist movement and into Marxist thought suggest an alternative penetration into the relationship between European radical thought and the historical configurations of the Black movement. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1327

Categorization

• XREF: Frames Wright as the peasant counterpoint to James, Du Bois, Padmore, Cox as petit-bourgeois intellectuals.