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Night And Black Boy Comparative Essay

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Night and Black Boy Comparative Essay Elie Wiesel’s Night and Richard Wright’s Black Boy are memoirs based on their authors’ experiences with discrimination. They both take place during the 1940s, and though Night is set in Nazi-dominated Europe and Black Boy is set in the American South, many parallels can be drawn between Elie and Richard’s experiences. Elie and Richard both face extensive discrimination based on their race, but can do little to change their situations. As a result, they are forced to suppress their anger and placate their oppressors in order to survive. Nazi-dominated Europe and the American South were societies dripping with racism. Both had laws for the sole purpose of discriminating against and segregating certain groups of people. In Germany and the countries it controlled, there were the Nuremburg laws, which revoked Jews’ citizenship, prohibited them from marrying ethnic Germans, banned them from owning valuables, required them to wear yellow Stars of David, and forced them to move into ghettos with atrocious living conditions (Sources 1 and 2). In the American South, states implemented “Jim Crow” laws that banned interracial marriage or cohabitation between whites and blacks and segregated public areas such as schools, stores, and buses. Though on paper the segregated areas were “separate but equal”, in practice they were anything but equal (Jim Crow handout, class discussions). These laws had dramatically detrimental effects on the wellbeing of

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