A Series on Cultural Identity: Langston Hughes

 

            Langston Hughes, not really the poem is what this artifact is about. Langston Hughes for me is an American Poet, one of the greatest in my personal opinion; he is not a ‘black’ or “African American” poet. This is about my struggle to deal with discrimination, my childhood disbelief that this existed, discrimination against my own race in puberty and my fear of burying my head in the sand now. As you might have guessed from my earlier discussions you know that I grew up where race, religions, and background were of little importance in my neighborhood. I never noticed that my many of my fellow white students and/or their parents didn’t feel comfortable with my friends from other countries, religious, or races all the way through elementary school. We went to a school consisting of many Upper Middle class families and the ‘diversification’ neighborhoods, meant to ‘even’ out wealth and race numbers in the school, so it was closer to average; our neighborhood was one of them. In middle school I got prosecuted for being a poor white kid, by many of my ‘white’ Upper classmates, and the diversification cultures almost completely none white in race were my friends, needless to state I learned to hate my race, because it was confused with the all powerful issues of wealth and power in society. In High school I went to the middle ground of being extreme and determined that the Upper classes were using racial issues to stop the lower class, getting ‘together’ from rising up against their social laws stopping us from getting anywhere no matter how hard we worked. I decide that by calling Langston Hughes a BLACK writer, they were making sure that his message of rising against social discrimination was limited to a certain race in education. My opinion at the current is a little bit less extreme, but Langston Hughes represents the many cultural idea changes I went through about racism and other discrimination, and my identity as someone trying to fight them all, while still reconciling that no discriminating view is okay and that they must be lost.