Analysis Of Black Faces, White Spaces By Langston Hughes

Black Faces, White Spaces

Langston Hughes’ Theme for English B is a piece that speaks volume to a student of color like me; as I type this opening paragraph, I sit in the Student Union at my predominately white institution, watching my peers pass me by. Like Hughes, I am a black face in a white space and as a result I move through this campus feeling that I don’t truly belong. Even though we have so much in common, one difference sticks out above all else. Through his relaxed, stream of consciousness style and amazing use of symbolism, Hughes captures the feelings of alienation and estrangement African Americans feel as they move through majority white spaces, and in some ways the world; his poem can easily be taken as an analogy of the African

In lines 6-15, we are taken along as Hughes digests the question. He says that he is “twenty-two, colored, [and] born in Winston-Salem” where he went to school, then to Durham and eventually the college in Harlem where he received this assignment. He realized he was the only colored student in his class—a situation many students of color have found themselves in before. His choice of the word “colored” when describing himself versus the class reiterates the feeling of estrangement that comes with being a black face in a white space. Hughes goes on to tell us of his walk home through Harlem. Hughes is very well known for his contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement centered around the lives of African Americans and the African American experience in the 1920s. His walk through Harlem instantly connects his audience to him, not just because he once lived there but his contributions to the movement. Many of us relate to the feeling of walking through contrasting spaces, one you belong in, and the other where you don’t, so this feeling instantly helps the reader emphasize with the speaker. This simplistic stream of thought writing pairs well with its lack of form or strict structure and helps the poem

Hughes knows that being black, his page could never be white, but it can be and is a part of his instructor—not just because he assigned the assignment but because he’s an American just like Hughes (28). Here, the symbolism around the whiteness of the page and the blackness of his words, making the page colored goes to show that black and white are tied to one another in a way that cannot be separated. There is no assignment without the white paper, or the black words. Ultimately there would be no African Americans in American without white intervention in Africa. There would be no America with out the labor and bloodshed of African