The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

“One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, ‘I want to write like a white poet’; meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white.’ And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself.” 

In this opening description of a young Black poet’s desires, Hughes interprets the underlying meaning of the poet’s initial statement, using it to introduce his ideas. Hughes explains to his reader his central argument: Black artists must be unafraid of being themselves. In addition, Hughes is more subtly laying the foundation of one of his other arguments, which is that a large portion of Black people in the US subconsciously “would like to be white,” which is an important tension around Black creativity.

“But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” 

This statement is the thesis of Hughes’s essay, and he argues that Black artists must reach the top of a racial mountain if they are to be authentically successful. One of the most important aspects of this central claim is Hughes’s connection of the “race toward whiteness” with being “as much American as possible.” By explicitly linking being White with being American, Hughes provides context for many of his later points regarding the difficulty of finding “racial individuality.”

“And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money.” 

Hughes aims for his reader to understand the intimate connections between Whiteness and other standards of success in US society. He makes this point explicit in order to support his claims about Black creativity.