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Richard Wright refutes The American Dream because he believes that the American Dream was not a dream that African Americans could make a reality and his American Dream was as simple as just wanting food on the table.

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Richard Wright grew up in the 1930’s and experienced hardships in a time that the American Dream was most prevalent and believed that as an African American he could never fulfill that dream due to increasing racial issues. In 1940 Richard published his book Native Son, it is about a young black man named Bigger Thomas who is living in poverty on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, in the 1930’s. In his book Richard Wright expresses that, “In the South, laws kept blacks separate from whites in all areas of life. Blacks were not allowed to eat in the same restaurants, attend the same schools, or sit in the same train cars as white people. They were raised to fear whites. If they dared offend a white person, they could be charged with a crime”. During this time black people were cast aside and treated as second class citizens. If black people were treated as lowers than how could they possibly succeed. White people enforced segregation and made it so black people had to go out of there way to do anything, and if everything is a struggle how are you meant to dream big dreams, and how would it ever be possible to achieve those dreams.

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Richard Wright was born on a plantation in Mississippi. He was the son of a sharecropper and grandson to a former slave. As a grandson of a slave there were not many opportunities that were presented to Richard. Also at the time African Americans did not have the same rights as they do now and that made it extremely difficult to become successful. Richard Wright does not believe in The American Dream because he believes that the American Dream was not a dream that African Americans could make a reality and his American Dream was as simple as just wanting food on the table. In the book review Richard Wright’s Blues Ralph Ellison states, “Nevertheless, several critics have complained that it does not "explain" Richard Wright. Which, aside from the notion of art involved, serves to remind us that the prevailing mood of American criticism has so thoroughly excluded the Negro that it fails to recognize some of the most basic tenets of Western democratic thought when encountering them in a black skin. They forget that human life possesses an innate dignity and mankind an innate sense of nobility; that all men possess the tendency to dream and the compulsion to make their dreams reality;”. All men are created equal and all deserve the right to dream and to fulfill that dream. For African Americans it wasn’t as easy as that because they were not given the a chance for the same opportunities as whites. Richard Wright believed that the American Dream was not real because he believed that only white people could fulfill that dream.