The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

As the title suggests, Langston Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” focuses on the experience of Black artists in the United States and their difficulties producing authentic creative work. Hughes alternately condemns Black artists who attempt to assimilate toward Whiteness and suggests that Black identity itself has significant material that could be used to create art that is “truly racial” (Paragraph 9). Hughes’s use of the term “racial” throughout the essay indicates his belief in the potential of art that is authentically, proudly Black.

In order to construct his arguments, Hughes involves descriptions of Black artists and his own philosophical musings on the larger landscape of US creativity. These two parallel notions make up the larger metaphor of the racial mountain: the fact that the Black artist “receive[s] almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people” (Paragraph 7). In other words, society does not encourage Black artists, whether they produce genuine, self-loving work or pieces that attempt to please a White audience; the absence of support is the metaphorical racial mountain up which Black artists must climb.

Hughes asserts that the Black artist must be “free to choose what he does… [and] also never be afraid to do what he might choose” (Paragraph 13). To Hughes, many Black artists try to appeal to some other audience or perspective, rather than their own. Black identity, culture, and heritage ought to be authentic inspirations to Black artists, and self-worship is reflected in Hughes’s language in his closing statement, in which he uses religious language to describe the Black artists who “build our temples for tomorrow” (Paragraph 14).

One critical aspect of Hughes’s argument is his derision of assimilation and its impact on the art world. At first, Hughes addresses this point through descriptions of well-to-do Black people whose entire lives are “like white folks” (Paragraph 3). Hughes builds on this critique to argue that Black artists have finally been “forcibly” (Paragraph 8) brought to the attention of the Black community because of a wider desire to be accepted by White people. Hughes does acknowledge that, despite the pull towards assimilation, there are some people who are able to create an “honest” (Paragraph 10) kind of artwork that is both “racial” (Paragraph 11) and “genius” (Paragraph 10).

Though much of the essay focuses on the broader themes of creativity and freedom from a Black perspective, Hughes also implicates himself in his vision of the racial mountain. Towards the end of the text, Hughes describes his own attempts to be “as sincere as [he] know[s] how to be” (Paragraph 11) in his own artwork. Hughes makes a personal confession, explaining that he is “ashamed” (Paragraph 13) by Black artists who want to be near to Whiteness and he hopes for a future in which he and his peers can “express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” (Paragraph 14). To Hughes, overcoming the racial mountain is about an internal journey to resist assimilation, to deny self-hatred, and to produce artwork that embraces Blackness.