Langston Hughes as an Anti Racialist
Racism or racialism is any action, practice or belief that reflects the racial worldview the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called ‘races’ that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality intellect morality and other cultural behavioral features and that some races are innately superior to others. Racism was at the heart of north American slavery and the overseas colonization and empire building activities of some western Europeans especially in the 18th century.
There had been many
persons in history who objected to this racist ideal. They are called anti-racialists.
Langston Hughes was one of them and many of his poems bear evidence of his
anti-racialist attitude.
‘The Negro Speaks of
Rivers’ is apparently concerned with proving the ancientness of the Negro race
but at a deeper level it is a protest against slavery of the black community in
a time of great racial intolerance, injustice and inequality in America. Hughes
inspired and united the black community when their voice was not accepted by the
predominantly white society. As a result he became the unofficial poet laureate
of the Harlem Renaissance that voiced the protest of the black Americans
against the discrimination made by the whites against the Negroes.
The poem ‘I, too Sing
America’ is about someone who is claiming his American identity and social and
civil rights. He is a black American who expresses his condition as a slave at
a white man’s house and hopes that sometime in the future he will be able to
sit at the same table with the white guests at his master’s house. this poem
was published when civil right movement aimed at ending the racial
segregation and discrimination between
the Negroes and the white Americans and winning constitutional rights for
voting for the black people. This poem ‘I, Too Sing America’ embodies the
poet’s anti-racialist attitude in a highly poetic form.
The ‘Harlem’ poem
reminds the readers of the Harlem Renaissance otherwise known as New Negro
Movement which took place in the 1920s for the realization of the black
Americans equal rights with the whites. It also anticipates the famous speech
named ‘I have a dream’ by Martin Luther King, jr. a decade later.
Thus in the above poems
we find many traces of Hughes anti-recitalist attitude. In many other poems of
Hughes such traces are also discernible.
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