The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

Of central concern in Hughes’s essay is the issue of being a Black artist in a White supremacist society, where race and racism influence both the creative process and the public’s reception of artwork. In the piece, Hughes focuses primarily on artists who are “promising” (Paragraph 1) or already well-known; at times, Hughes names specific artists who might be common household names, and, at other moments, Hughes obscures identities (typically when offering a criticism). Towards the conclusion of the essay, Hughes uses himself as an example of a Black artist, explicitly connecting his work with the legacy of his peers and forebears.

As Hughes explores the challenge of creating authentic art that does not attempt to assimilate towards Whiteness, he discusses different angles of Black identity and its influence on the artistic process and the artist’s own identity. In multiple examples, Hughes shows how Black culture can limit artists, primarily when other Black people push the artist towards so-called respectability and White mannerisms. He also demonstrates how Black culture can positively impact creativity, as in the examples of “the low-down folks, the so-called common element” (Paragraph 4) of Black people and their “wealth of colorful, distinctive material” (Paragraph 4).

The tensions between these social classes, to Hughes, mimic the challenges Black artists must face as they figure out how to produce something separate from White culture that is generative, creative, and rich. The Black artist, to Hughes, is constantly working “against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from [other Black people] and unintentional bribes from... whites” (Paragraph 9). This conflict means that creating art that is based in freedom is a challenging, ongoing process for Black artists, one that excites Hughes as he thinks about the possibility of this vision.