Race and The White Responsibility in Richard Wright's Native Son in The Light of Levinasian Ethics of Alterity

Attempting to have an ethical life is one of the important demands that makes everyone think about it and we cannoteasily disregard it. It is so essential and has diversity of answers because different notions of having the ethical life eventually give augment to different conceptions of what is correct and incorrect.Blacks and whites influence each other in day-to-day relationships and must interact in a variety of conditions but it contains at least a minimal level of communication and cooperation.We know that the problems of race and racism will never finish butLevinas’smoral philosophy thatis 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 racismandoffers individuality and the ways of having an ethical life. In this paper the researcher focused on the racial problems and white peoples’ responsibility for blacks’ inferiority within the framework of Levinasian Ethics of Alterity. This research work also intends to examine familial and social relationships of white characters of Richard Wright's Native Sonin order to find whether their relations are ethical or not and from excerpts in the novel it will be demonstrated that whites are somehow responsible for black's situations.