This is my essay for Survey of American Literature final task. It's an analysis about 2 poems by Langston Hughes, "I, Too" and "Theme for English B". I know this writing lacks in many ways for my vocabulary is very limited and I'm sometimes lost in tenses, but at least I tried. So, this is my writing. Happy reading.
Pursuing
Equality through Being One True Self
Langston Hughes’ “I, Too” and “Theme for English B”
are two poems published on 1940s (I, Too was published on 1945 and Theme for
English B was published on 1949) when the civil rights movement was happening
in America. Civil rights movement is a social movement against racial
segregation and discrimination towards African Americans.[1] The
African Americans struggled to gain the equality in American society. Many African
Americans were discriminated from society for their colored skin, they were
treated unequally in education, economic, and even before law. They were not
able to even give their votes whereas giving a vote means you’re contributing
to your country’s development. There was a rule on 1945, stating that only
white men could vote in the Democratic primary.[2]
For the segregation and discrimination were getting more serious and
unbearable, some people started to voice their protest and make a movement.
Hughes is one of many African Americans who contributed to civil rights
movement. He wrote several books, plays, short stories, essays, and poems as
forms of his critics against racism issue.[3] These
two poems I’m going to analyze in this essay also contained racism issue where
African Americans were seen as the inferior to the whites. They were treated
differently in society. In “I, Too”, the writer was sent to the kitchen when
the owner of the house had visitors. It shows the different class between the
white and the African American. At that time, people only ate at dining table, those
who ate in the kitchen were considered lower. This means that the whites didn’t
consider the African Americans as equal with them. Meanwhile, in “Theme for
English B”, the narrator is a student who was assigned to write a page for
English B by his white teacher. It was said that he was the only African
American in the class he attended. He wrote a “confession” about how it felt to
be the only colored student in class, how he wanted them to see him as a
“normal” person, a part of them. However, both narrators of the poems conveyed
the same message. They wanted the whites to see them as a part of the society
(by society I mean the whites). They didn’t see themselves as the inferiors.
They looked on themselves as equal to the white and I found the narrative of
the poems quite interesting. Therefore I decided to bring up this topic as the
main topic of my essay, that the narrators tried to gain the equality through
showing their true selves to the society
