He comes from the bottom rung of the American social and economic ladder. Due to his lack of education he was relegated to menial jobs, thus making him feel trapped his entire life, resenting, hating, and fearing the white people who defined the narrow confines of his existence. Bigger does not see white people as individuals to be feared, but rather as a collective, overwhelming force that tells him what to do, where to live, where to work, etc. ”, therefore very closely aligned with it. However, Wright seems to have some hope for a manhood not marked by race. The hero of Native Son, Bigger Thomas, is one of the millions “whose existence ignored racial and national lines” (Wright, “How Bigger” 446)” (Matthews 277). Said makes the same argument regarding the domination of Western society over Eastern cultures. He argues that much of the Western world's study of Islamic civilization was a political intellectualism intended more for the self-assertion of Europe, rather than the objective intellectual questioning and academic study of Easter cultures. For this reason, Orientalism functioned as a method of practical and cultural discrimination applied as a kind of imperial rule, claiming that the Western Orientalist knows more about the East than the Orientals themselves. Western society has studied the Orient only to be able to claim that the Orientals living in their lands know their own history and culture better because they now live in a more educated world. Wright reiterates this argument in Native Son, where whites have dominated Western society, arguing that they know exactly how black culture works and should work because they have been dealing with it since the beginning of America. Bigger is just a product of his culture, because white people created him to be the monster they expect him to be. This is the same though