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).