In "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," which first appeared in The Nation (1926), Langston Hughes begins with this paragraph:
Hughes immediately humanizes his essay by using a simple comment he once heard. Writers are always listening, always remembering something, always waiting for the right time to use it. So what matters here? It is Hughes's unsettling balance of detachment, sympathy, and rage that brings us into his narrative.
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. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. 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.What a start! Hughes dissects the young black poet's comments three times over. He follows with a statement that both pities and excoriates him. His third sentence condemns the young man to a future of artistic mediocrity. Then Hughes reverses course to set up the theme so aptly described in the essay title by asserting such compromises for an American black artist are inevitable or a Sisyphean fate awaits the one who remains true to his race.
Hughes immediately humanizes his essay by using a simple comment he once heard. Writers are always listening, always remembering something, always waiting for the right time to use it. So what matters here? It is Hughes's unsettling balance of detachment, sympathy, and rage that brings us into his narrative.
