The White House

In the best of all possible worlds, it would be a good indicator of American social and cultural progress to say a poem as angry, as discontented, as gloomy as “The White House” needed historic context, that McKay’s outrage against racism and widespread discrimination in America now required footnotes to give it meaning—sadly, that is far from the case. America still struggles with entrenched racism, which now uses the reach of social media and the darkest corners of the web to make immediate the insidious logic of replacement theory (the racist belief that liberals are trying to replace/overwhelm conservative white voters with voters and/or immigrants of color) that makes inevitable the frustration, bitterness, and anger that McKay writes about. Despite seeming to be perpetually on the verge of at last a day of racial reckoning, an epiphany into the cannibal logic of racism in America, the cycle continues. The toxic logic of hate remains in racially-divided contemporary America, as real and as threatening as it was in McKay’s Jim Crow America.

“The White House” is a product of and a response to what is now termed the Segregation Era in the long history of America’s troubled race relations.