Discuss Langston Hughes as an Anti-Racialist.

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.