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Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience juxtapose a child's innocent perception against an adults corrupted and repressed perception, despite the conditions of the period. "The Little Black Boy" was written during the imperial period in which the dominant class, the wealthy aristocrats, employed African slaves as cheap labour for the plantation culture. Blake disapproved of enlightenment rationalism, institutionalised religion and slavery, and through his poetry, instead of presenting the norm he gives voice to those who were traditionally silenced by the dominant culture such as child sweeps and the little black boy, in order to assert their worth and humanity. The major speaker in this poem is the little black boy, but entwined in his utterance is the voice of his mother and God. All three voices bring different aspects of individualism and perception to the poem. This poem, in terms of Blake's proposition can be described as "seen through doors, which were not cleansed". This is evident because the little black boy accepts traditional views of his race, which directly imposes oppression. Although, injustice has been inflicted on him and his mother in the way of dislocating them from their homeland into a life of slavery, he believes that it is he who is a source of "corruption" to the English society through his imperfections. Three lines of the first stanza represent this acceptance of a recessive race. .
"And i am black, but O! My soul is white;.
White as an angel is the English child,.
But i am black, as if bereav"d of light.".
Only through our partially cleansed doors of the twenty-first century do we recognise the oppression inflicted upon the little black boy. Blake's personal audiences of eighteenth century England would not have recognised this, as the exact causes of the little black boys" oppression were embedded in their traditional social conducts. .
Although the little black boy is at first interested in the meanings behind his feelings of repression, his mother soon quashes these.
