Humanism and poststructuralism constitute two dominant modes for engaging Richard Wright's Black Boy While ostensibly very different theoretical frameworks, both privilege the aesthetic dimensions of Wright's discourse and consequently displace the political concerns of Wright; in other words on the contemporary scene Wright has been de-politicized. This essay recovers Wright's politics, specifically his materialist understanding of race. I demonstrate how Black Boy articulates a critique of (racial) ideology and consequently demystifies the notion that race is a biological entity. As Wright puts it in a 1953 interview "[r]ace is a social myth, not a biological fact" ("An Interview" 156). I argue that Wright's ideology critique of race opens a space for what I call transformative race theory--a theory committed to social change. In this postmodern moment it is commonly held that race is a social construction. If race is a social construction and then why does it translate as a biological entity in the cultural imaginary? This is the precise task of ideology where the aim is to translate the social into the biological. As Louis Althusser argues ideology is "representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (162). Thus ideology is a set of discourses, images, myths that establish an imaginary relationship between the individual and the world. Imaginary does not mean that this relationship is non-existent (false) since people do indeed live their lives according to these "imaginary" relationships with their world. By imaginary I mean that one occupies a subject position from which one assumes a relationship of presence and fullness.
