: Institutional Injustice and Murders of Black People in John E. Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life and Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys

Abstract

This article focuses on anti-Black institutional racism in the USA through John Edgar Wideman's Writing to Save a Life and Colson Whitehead‟s The Nickel Boys. It denounces acts of torture, racist murders and unfair trials perpetrated, in contemporary American history, against Black people, under the aegis of official institutional procedures. It exposes the injustice present in some of the most visible flagships of a political system which purports to be democratic and equalitarian: the educational institutions, the criminal justice system, and the army of the USA. It demonstrates that between the assaults of civil courts and courts martial, between escaped prisoner hunts and firing squads, torture and police blunders, that black lives do not really matter. The Marxist literary theory and Critical Race Theory are used as prism for the analysis in this paper. Its objective is to highlight, through the two books, the instrumentalization of the institutions of the United States for the purpose of acts of racist violence, biased procedures, and murders, committed on black people, in order to contribute to putting an end to it.