Race and Ethics of Alterity in Richard Wright’s Native Son

It is clear that the problems of race and racism will never finish. This book focused on the racial problems that who is responsible for the superiority of whites and for inferiority of blacks in white dominant societies. Emmanuel Levinas's moral philosophy known as Alterity deals with the concepts of responsibility, the encounter with the face-of-the-Other, the responsibility from this encounter and the reaction to this responsibility resists the question of race and racism and offers the ways of having an ethical life. This study within Levinas’s framework and through his notion of Alterity intends to examine familial and social relationships of black and white characters in Richard Wright’s Native Son that obviously shows the supremacy of whites and inferiority of blacks in order to find whether their relations are ethical or not. It shows that instead of discrimination in racist societies, people can have the moral society with accepting equality among each other.