Subservience

Subservience is something someone needs to be able to have, but also know when not to use it. For African Americans in the South during the time of segregation, subservience was expected and demanded, and required to make a living, or to not be killed. However, sometimes you do need to question what people tell you to know if it’s the right thing to do. Subservience is a necessary part of life, but within reason. You need to know how to listen to authority and be respectful, but you also need to know how to think for yourself, and how to say no. It all comes down to the situation, and knowing right from wrong. When you’re a worker, you have to have a certain level of respect and subservience to your boss and people in positions above you, however you have to also know when something’s not right, especially if you’re an African American during the time of slavery and segregation. You’re hired to be subservient, but subservience can also get you into a lot of trouble. For example, in Milgram’s psychology experiment, he had a person of authority tell another person to distribute electric shocks to people in a different room that they couldn’t see. 65% of people administered a deadly shock to the person in a different room, simply because the authority figure told them too. Of course, the people in the other room weren’t really getting administered shocks, and Milgrim’s ethics were later questioned, but this is an example of how subservience can lead you down a bad path. However, in the case of Richard Wright (which I believe I was actually supposed to be writing about all along but got carried away), subservience is very necessary because if he isn’t subservient then he gets beaten. In that time period, African Americans weren’t in a place to question authority or think over what people told them to do, they were to just do it.