The White House

It is a measure of the problem with racism in America that a poem written more than a century ago by an angry and frustrated Black man condemning discrimination against Black people still resonates today. More than a century after the repeal of most Jim Crow legislation, long after Brown vs. the Board of Education, and the bloody street birth of the civil rights movement, the Rodney King beating (1990), the protests in Ferguson, Missouri (2014), the street murder of George Floyd (2020), the broad-daylight hunting down of Ahmaud Arbery for being a Black man jogging through a white neighborhood (2020), and the racially-motivated mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store (2022), racism still reflects an entrenched socio-economic cultural mindset: Black people are part of America, certainly, but they are apart from it as well. How far we have come, Claude McKay’s poem reminds us in 1919, and how far we still have to go.

At the center of McKay’s argument is the chilling reality that despite the rhetoric of America as the home of the free, despite the rhetoric of all people being created equal, America unironically sustains an “us” versus “them” mentality when it comes to Black and white relations. There is no conversation between the races. Rather, the tensive dynamic is defined in the opening two lines when the poet speaks to You and your door and how your world is shut out from us. McKay’s poem is a reminder of how it feels to be disenfranchised, to be kept apart from a person’s birthright culture, how it feels not to be an American. In the face of racism, given the bald evidence of white individuals maintaining their separate nation, in the face of discrimination exercised without apology within a democracy the foundation premise of which is equality, in the face of being denied even the expectation of equal housing, equal voting rights, equal opportunity for an education, equal access to employment opportunities, the poet meets such injustice not with anger but with restraint; not with violence but with patience; not with confrontation but rather with the benevolent trust that white people, who must see the immortality of discrimination and the dead-end of racism, will themselves correct such egregious and offensive behavior. I will keep my heart free from hatred, the poet promises, despite (and not because of) the poison of white America’s hate.

At the center of the poem is the concept of the white house itself. McKay himself waged a kerfuffle with well-intentioned but cautious editors who, after the poem first appeared in The Liberator, one of the most forward-looking and incendiary political and social publications of what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance, sought to republish the poem but requested McKay change the title to “The White Houses.” The editor feared the title “The White House” would suggest that the poem (and the poet for that matter) targeted the president of the United States (then an ailing Woodrow Wilson) as the source of his anger and his bitterness, which was the farthest from McKay’s intention. McKay fought the title change—in the end the editors agreed to something of a compromise, retitling the poem but providing an asterisk that provided the original title.

For McKay, the idea of the white house, at once inviting and yet cold, suggested white America itself, the term “house” suggesting a home, a place of welcome, a place of acceptance, a place that provides stability and the security of roots, a kind of permanent and reliable shelter. The image would have particular relevance for a race largely brought to America against their will for centuries, their roots denied them, forever feeling displaced. The idea of a home, the concept of a house then had special relevance to Black people not appreciated by white people. For McKay, that reality—a home denied Black people in white America—had nothing to do with whoever was sitting in the Oval Office. This was not a political problem, per se—this was and is an American problem. The source of the poem’s anger is at once simple and complex: the idea of an entire race of the disenfranchised denied access to their own home but compelled, metaphorically at least, to press their tightened faces against its glass door, helpless, able to see so clearly what is denied them so completely.

The poet refuses anger as a response; giving into hate would cause the poet to become the very “chafing savage” (Line 7) that too many white Americans, in their most racist fears, believe the poet and other Black people to be. Rather, the poet counsels patience, forbearance, and the difficult wisdom to maintain equanimity despite the everyday struggle—the poet says every hour—to find the wisdom not to fight back, not to give in to violence, despite the anger that makes his heart “sore and raw” (Line 10). Restraint, the poet argues, under such pressure, under such constant reminders of their “second-class” status, under such duress, the ability to endure is nothing less than “superhuman” (Line 11).

In the end, the speaker does choose restraint, a decision that grants Black people the moral high ground and gifts the poem whatever optimism it can muster in such a world: Do not let white racism destroy the warmth and tenderness of Black hearts or infect the integrity of Black souls with its toxic logic of hatred.