Theme for English B Culture Analysis

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The poem Theme for English B, by Langston Hughes, deals with a black students attempt to understand his identity. The simple statement let it "come out of you, then it will be true" on the part of the instructor reveals his inadequacy in understanding the complexities of black identity. Racial memories of the past coupled with the sense of dislocation do not allow him to have the same kind of freedom that the whites can have. In fact, Hughes shows not just this problematic notion of identity but also the disjunction that occurs when the black want to reach new levels of freedom and opportunity. There is a clear break between the lived world of the narrator, Harlem, and the university at the top of the hill, Columbia university, and the narrator as someone traversing both these spaces recognizes that he can't identify completely with either and at the same time cannot deny either. Moreover, his recognition that the negro problem is not just a black problem (it is something that both the whites and the blacks have to deal with) leads him to recognize that the only difference is in their inability to recognize their inherent inseparability. The only description of the assignment given by the instructor is, “Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you” and then the instructor claims that if the students let it come out of them, it will be true. But the student is not sure “it’s that simple.” Then he begins to list all the reasons that such an assignment might not be so simple: he is twenty-two, older than most students in his class probably, colored; he was born in North Carolina, went to school in Durham, NC, then comes to college in Harlem. Furthermore, he is the only African American in his class, which seems strange for Harlem in 1951, when the poem was published. Then the student gives the route he takes to get from the college to his

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