In the poem “the Little Black boy”, Blake carefully chooses the speaker as a child. I think he does this so that when the boy asks questions, it is not considered rude because the little boy is asking the question without the intention of being racist but because he is just purely curious. The child wants to know why “his soul is white… like an English child’s” and yet his skin is so dark. Later on, his mother explains how God gave him dark skin to withstand the sun’s heat and to protect him and that his skin colour is nothing but a “cloud”. After a person dies, the darkness from the skin will be removed and the person’s skin will be white like a lamb’s, and everyone will live together, innocent and white. So technically he is saying how race doesn’t really matter because in the end everyone will just end up equal in the end. Hm ok so at this point I’m thinking that the speaker thinks the only way to be pure is if you have light skin. But during this time, the white community was more advanced and developed then that of a black community. And since Blake had the mindset that humans were happier and in general better in the state of nature, doesn’t that mean that Blake believes the white man was more corrupt? But even near the end of the poem, the boy who was once black but was uplifted from the “cloud” is still submissive to a white man. So, through all of this evidence and the poem, how do you think Blake is dealing with the issue of race and where does he stand in all of this?
