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 casual 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 Americans through
hundreds 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 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 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 in 1945, a
decade before the Civil Rights Movement started in America. The Civil Right
Movement aimed at ending the racial segregation and discrimination between the
Negroes and the white Americans, and wining constitutional rights for voting
for the black people. About 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the
African Americans were living in a sordid world of disenfranchisement,
segregation, suppression and oppression and racial violence. This poem “I have
a dream”, by Martin Luther King, Jr. a decade later.
Thus, in the above poems, we find many
traces of Hughes’ anti-racialist attitude. In many other poems of Hughes such
traces are also discernible.
No comments:
Post a Comment