Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: How Expectations Create Realities
By: Lucas A. Butchko
Tags: Literary, Literature, Issues

The concept of self-fulfilling prophecies is one examined often by psychologists and sociologists in order to explain a phenomenon that occurs between people’s expectations of others and what becomes their reality. A very basic example is when a parent or teacher tells a student that they won’t be able to succeed in something they are attempting. This can result in one of two things: either that student will work harder to spite that authority figure, or resign themselves to defeat without attempting to start. Very rarely is the latter a conscious decision, and it is the basis of self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-fulfilling prophecy is defined as “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true” (Merton 1968: 477). When a person or group of people constantly has certain expectations or definitions assigned to them, they are then more likely to submit to those expectations. This phenomenon has been heavily explored in literature as well, especially as part of the Harlem Renaissance.

The man who is often credited with kickstarting the Harlem Renaissance is Alain Locke with his book, The New Negro. In his initial essay titled “Enter the New Negro,” he says that black Americans seemed to have, “slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority” (Locke). Locke was referencing that in1925, black Americans had been undergoing years of discrimination and labeling by whites. Some white people used black Americans as an example of what “bad people” look like, while others pointed out their ‘problems’ and how those could be fixed. This left those being scrutinized to decide how they were to view themselves, and left many stuck with just what other people expected of them: a self-fulfilling prophecy. Locke, however, was saying that while all this was happening, there was a mindset starting to develop that was unique from these experiences, that refused to be boxed in. Locke’s writing became a manifesto for the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that brought African American art to the surface of American culture.

Out of this movement, we see many writers working through their identity and role in this changing landscape. One such writer is Richard Wright, whose novel Native Son deals heavily with this concept. In the novel, Bigger Thomas is an uneducated black man who spends his entire life being defined by and dictated to by the white society around him, and eventually comes to resent it. Eventually, this leads him to violence against others around him, although initially only other blacks. He ends up accidentally killing the daughter of his white employers, and winds up deciding that this is his time to finally strike back against the society that has caused him to feel constantly threatened and even inferior.

This all occurs due to the fact that Bigger feels as though he has no other choice in life but to fight back against the system in a violent manner. In talking about his novel, Wright often mentions that Bigger is not meant to be a protagonist; rather, he is intended to be a warning of what can happen due to the dangerous system of racism that exists in the United States. He wants to demonstrate this concept of self-fulfilling prophecy; by constantly doubting Bigger and putting him in what is perceived as his “place,” he begins by just accepting it until he eventually turns to violent outrage and crime.

Wright’s novel has been criticized a lot for the writing of Bigger’s extreme and graphic violence, many stating that the violence undercuts the message of the novel and paints Bigger in a very simplistic light. However, in a journal article titled, “The Function of Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son,” Robert James Butler argues that this level of violence was necessary for Bigger’s character and to accurately display the complicated and hateful world that he has found himself in. Butler states, “Bigger and Mary share a common humanity” and that “although this humanity is frustrated in different ways by environment, the same results are produced: alienation and rebellion” (Butler 5).

Butler describes how these characters represent two sides of the same coin, Mary representing what Bigger’s life could be if he were not part of a society that held him back from that potential. Thus, in killing Mary later in the book, he is acting out against a version of himself that he would not be able to realize due to the racism and doubt cast on him by society. We see that subconsciously, Bigger realizes that he can never have this life that Mary seems to represent, and he then acts out violently against it, which is what many people would expect of a young black man, and is even the reason many black men in this time were accused of violent crimes that they didn’t commit. By falling prey to that expectation, Bigger is further confirming the beliefs of all the people who continue to discriminate against black Americans and finds no sympathy in his later trial.

One of the main themes to come out of the Harlem Renaissance was a form of “respectability politics,” the idea that in making progress, the dominant society should not be criticized for their exclusion of minorities, but minorities should instead paint themselves as similar to the dominant society in order to be included. Black Americans, especially those of educated or otherwise higher classes, would attempt to demonstrate to whites that they were just as dignified and capable, aiming to debunk racist portrayals of themselves that originated in white supremacist discourse. Essentially, they aimed to break the expectations whites had of them, and to remove the negative expectations that often caused those to fall into self-fulfilling prophecies. However, this often came at the price of frowning at black Americans who were a part of the working class and creating distance between the black elites and working class.

In an article titled, “Politics of Respectability,” Angela Hornsby-Gutting writes, “the demand for respectable behavior across the race reinforced an assimilationist, conservative agenda antithetical to the cultural practices of the black masses” (Hornsby-Gutting 2). Many perceived this concept as resigning to the thought that “white culture” was the correct one, and minorities must fit into it in order to be properly accepted. This did not sit well with everybody, including Wright. In Native Son, we can clearly see that he does not believe black Americans should be conforming to what whites want them to be, but rather that their identity is unique, valid, and should be accepted as such. In Bigger’s trial, the argument is made not that he is an innocent man, but that these murders were caused by the pressure the dominant culture places on black men and that people would continue to see more of this violence if this did not change. Clearly, Wright disagreed with the idea that black Americans needed to fit in and rather thought that they should simply be given respect and fair treatment because they were human.

Self-fulfilling prophecy is a powerful concept that can be used to explain, or at least examine, a lot of different phenomena in today’s society. From incarceration rates of young black men to college attendance levels, the expectations set before one has begun can cause huge ripples for both individuals and for our nation as a whole. Wright knew that this would be something that would impact minorities, especially black Americans, for a long time, and decided to write about what the impact of this would be in a novel that was met with both acclaim and backlash. However, as Wright wrote, we still see situations today where Americans end up in troubling situations simply because of the color of their skin.

Works Cited

Butler, Robert James. “The Function of Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 20, no. 1/2, 1986, p. 9., doi:10.2307/2904549.

Hedström Peter, and Peter Bearman. The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. OUP Oxford, 2009.

Hornsby-Gutting, Angela. “Politics of Respectability.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Vol. 13: Gender. Edited by Nancy Bercaw and Ted Ownby, and Charles Wilson. U of North Carolina Press, 2009: 238–242. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469616728_bercaw.62. Accessed 5 May 2020.

Locke, Alain, and Arnold Rampersad. The New Negro. Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.

Locke, Alain. “Enter the New Negro.” National Humanities Center Resources Toolbox, National Humanities Center, 2010, nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/migrations/text8/lockenewnegro.pdf.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1 March 1940, JPG.