However, at some point in this country’s history, it became Black America’s responsibility, through the Black intellectu

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. All were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction period. From the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries, segregation laws in Southern states separated African Americans and whites in almost every aspect of public life — from railroad cars and schools to restrooms and drinking fountains. Varying from state to state, these laws were supposed to establish facilities that were “separate but equal.” In reality, these were almost never equal.,Skin color corresponds to treatment, forcing human beings to create an identity from the mixture. Supported by this nation’s history, whether we choose to adopt traditional understandings of race or not, the lure to understand race and racism will remain. Defining race’s impact on everyday life, however, is an elaborate voyage often simplified for easy digestion.,The essay’s center is Hughes’s theory of an anonymous African-American poet’s wish to be respected as a “poet” as opposed to a “Negro poet,” and Hughes decoding that poet’s emotion as a more profound wish to be white.,This country’s central issue is not that all white people are bad, but how whiteness has been the metric to describe normal. Hughes criticized America and told Blackness to stand on differences, hoping we maximize the cultural qualities that make the African-American “African,” not what makes the African-American “American.”,Because of the avalanche, communicating race’s nature contains questionable beneficiaries, inevitably placing society at an impasse. Writing pieces on the state of Black America pushes the American conversation forward, highlighting and celebrating this nation’s areas of improvement. On the contrary, though, our voices function as caplets for whiteness to consume, feeding the United States an herbal remedy to heal its most ancient disease.,Abandoning Blackness means being absorbed by the snow, swallowed by the chilling white wave. The racial avalanche’s primary focus is consumption through communication methods, using art and media to get the job done.,Everything under Jim Crow was about race, finding a single drop of it to assign value to specific groups according to their placement in a state-sanctioned system of racial discrimination.,Americans’s willingness to hear Black perspectives doesn’t translate to progressive policy, only tokenized embodiments of approved rhetoric. By any measure, people of African descent remain disproportionately clustered at the bottom of the social hierarchy, regardless of the number of Black men and women we have speaking on behalf of the disenfranchised.,As the United States touts a more color-blind society today, race is more unstable and dynamic than initially imagined, appearing to manifest like an avalanche, rolling toward Blackness in an attempt to consume it whole.,Our medicine heals the beds of unearthed racism that may arise from ignorance. White readers ought to hear voices who challenge their idealistic understanding of America. Otherwise, they are bound to remain unenlightened, doomed to repeat past mistakes, falling ill to the same sickness as their ancestors.,Hughes’s mountain looms in our background, but a few new revelations arrive, allowing us to build on his initial premise. His metaphorical mountain has become something more stringent since 1926. The segregated America Jim Crow created proliferates through Hughes’s verbiage in the past, echoing covertly into the present.,James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 — May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. One of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance,Hughes elaborates, “This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America — this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” According to Hughes, race endures as both a repressed and calculated experience.,These words, written nearly 100 years ago, establishes an American perspective that hasn’t vanished. In 1926, the poet Langston Hughes wrote the essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a beautiful declaration critiquing America’s relationship to the Black voice.,My schedule for Monday included two workout sessions — a run in the morning and another in the evening. I honestly thought it was a mistake. At the time, the concept of exercising twice in a single day was completely foreign to me. However, after a few weeks, I started to get used to it.