Langston Hughes's Radical Poetry and the "End of Race"

MELUS, Fall, 1998 by Anthony Dawahare

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Hughes's radical perspective is most apparent in his analysis of black oppression in the U.S. By 1932, he clearly was moving away from his nationalist perspective as a Harlem Renaissance writer and toward a view of class rather than race alone as the basis for both economic racism and collective struggle. In Scottsboro Limited (1932), for example, an agit-prop verse play about the Scottsboro incident, Hughes represents the accused young men in the process of becoming politically astute. While "hoboing" on a train in search of work prior to their arrest, the nameless (and emblematic) black young men realize the class basis of their wage-slavery and thus their class affinity with white workers:

   6th Boy: (In wonder)
      Look a-yonder you-all, at dem fields
      Burstin' wid de crops they yields.
      Who gets it all?
   3rd Boy: White folks.
   8th Boy: You mean de rich white folks.
   2nd Boy:
      Yes, 'cause de rich ones owns de land.
      And they don't care nothin' 'bout de po' white man.
3rd Boy:
      You's right. Crackers is just like me--
      Po' whites and niggers, ain't neither one free.

A characteristic Hughesian discursive strategy here is the dramatization of the movement from a nationalist to a "post-nationalist" consciousness and self-identification. In fact, in his radical poetry, he consistently replaces the "black, like me" self-identification of his Harlem Renaissance period with a class-conscious sentiment that might be paraphrased "worker, like me." In "Air Raid Over Harlem" (1935), for example, he ends the poem with a call to workers' multiracial unity: "Black and white workers united as one ... THE BLACK AND WHITE WORKERS-- / you and me" (188).

A glaring example of Hughes's critique of a nationalist consciousness occurs in his rather aesthetically crude poem entitled "White Man," which begins with a black nationalist persona who comments on how the "white man" has exploited blacks economically by confining them to only low paying, menial jobs as garbage men and janitors; imperialistically by colonizing Africa; and culturally by signing black jazz musicians and garnishing profits. Yet, two thirds into the poem, we find a similar discursive strategy as in Scottsboro Limited when Hughes's persona comes around to asking a "post-nationalist" rhetorical question: "Is it true, White Man? / Is your name in a book / Called the Communist Manifesto? / Is your name spelled / C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T? / Are you always a White Man? / Huh?" (194-95). It is difficult to know what capitalists of color Hughes had in mind when he typed those words, but it is not inconceivable to suppose he could have been referring to those "champions of the darker races," as the Japanese imperialists represented themselves, or perhaps the small black American bourgeoisie who, as one CP pamphlet at that time explained, "makes its profits by taking advantage of segregation and the ideas of `white superiority' ... by speculating in real estate in the segregated sections of large cities and by extracting extremely high rents from their Negro tenants ... [or in the cosmetic industry] by commercializing the idea of `white beauty,'" etc. (Ford and Allen 8). Nonetheless, Hughes's radical poetry shatters from "below" the myth of exclusively white domination by depicting the existence of a poor white working class exploited in common with blacks, and from "above" by representing the existence of a rich class of color exploiting in common with wealthy whites.

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Langston Hughes's Radical Poetry and the "End of Race"

MELUS, Fall, 1998 by Anthony Dawahare

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