Richard Wright's Native Son marked an important watershed in the history of Black Literature and amply demonstrated how race had become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems with fundamentally opposed economic interests. The novel exploded on the conscience of America by demonstrating, in Wright's words, how "[i]njustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life." In a searching analysis of the novel, the paper relocates the paradigms of class, race, ideology, and media in the context of the `American Dilemma.' Against the vantage point of the current scenario, with the first black president Barack Obama firmly ensconced in the White House, the attitude and approach of the protagonist of Wright's novel may seem an anachronism, in terms of racial dilemma, in the world's most powerful democracy. But the fact cannot be ignored that even today, with statistics confirming that there are more black men in jails than in schools in America, Richard Wright's pain and anguish have not lost their relevance.

The racial rumblings which echoed and reechoed in the vestibules of American socio-political structure from time to time—mild and subdued in the beginning, bitter and vociferous with the passage of time—aroused the dormant discontent that lay slumbering in the subconscious psyche of the blacks in America. The earliest African-American voice of protest found expression in various literary forms like slave narratives, autobiographies, and fictional works. The first effective account of race relations in America was provided by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), the novel which prompted Abraham Lincoln to greet the author, on her visit to the White House in 1862, as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war" (Bailey, 1974).

Towards the beginning of the twentieth century, the novels of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and that of Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Love of Landry (1900) and The Fanatics (1901), sought to project undertones of black protest in a rather mild and feeble manner. Conforming to the a priori myths of the white world, these novelists recorded their protest in a more or less traditional white American terms with the aim of impressing the white readers rather than evoking their thinking on racial issues. Even the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was, in large measure, apolitical, for it did not see "artistic expression as a substitute for physical violence, as a channel for the festering hate that this society has created in the minds and souls of all black people" (Davis, 1989, p. 43).

American Literature Journal, Socio-Political Structure, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,NAACP, Momentary Impulse, Sociological Disorders, Psychological Reaction, Socioeconomic Circumstances.