older and wiser

On page 265, the entire page is full of insight from the older Wright, writing the memoir and thinking back. The first paragraph says ‘(It was not until I had left the delicatessen job that I saw how grossly I had misread the motives and attitudes of Mr. Hoffman and his wife. I had not yet learned anything that would have helped me to thread my way through these perplexing racial relations. Accepting my environment at its face value, trapped by my own emotions, I Kept asking myself what had black people done to bring this crazy world upon them?)’
These thoughts are almost like after thoughts. Obviously these are thoughts as an adult, but they don’t seem like he wrote them in because he premeditated them. They feel like as he was writing this, he realized this and wrote it in, so that the reader knew his thought process. Of course he probably did think about these before he wrote them in the book.
In this particular passage, he talks about why would a white Jewish couple want to hire a black man. All of his life he would think that they would hire him because he was black and just as low as they were. They then had something to control. He thinks this until he finally realizes that they just hired him because they needed help. They didn’t think much of the fact that he was black. He talks about being trapped in his own emotions, and to me this means that because he has always been taught to think this way, it is really hard for him to think any other way. He knows that he should start to be more open minded like the rest of the North, but he can’t. He asks himself what had black people done to deserve this. They have done nothing, but because they were raised in the south, they do not know any other way to think. This is why they have a crazy world upon them. In the South, it is because of the white people there. In the North it is because of the way that the white Southerners have made them think to bring this world upon them.