TENSION – or HOW A DINNER GUEST CAN BECOME A “PROBLEM”
Sridutt Nimmagadda – Modern Poetry, Professor Meredith Martin
While reading Langston Hughes’ Dinner Guest: Me, I can’t help but wonder if the setting in the poem is the future Hughes’ character from I, Too (Sing America) desired: African-Americans now hold a place at the table. However, his wishes taken literally; the speaker may have a place at the dinner table, but racism is still present just as in so many of Hughes’ poems. However, the nature of this discrimination has evolved. Dinner Guest: Me features no imagery of the lynching and overt racism present in poems like Song for a Dark Girl and Gal’s Cry for a Dying Lover. Instead, we are introduced to a latent form of discrimination: Post-intentional racism. This very form of discrimination pervades contemporary discussion about race and culture in America today, rendering the comparatively little-known Dinner Guest: Me an …show more content…
This interpretation is corroborated by his hosts asking questions about racial affairs “demurely” and expressing guilt over their white background (1.5-1.14). This confirms Hughes’ argument because while nominal equality may have been reached (after all, an African-American can sit at a white dinner table), his hosts still fear him. He is not an equal to them, and so he is still being discriminated against. By this interpretation, perhaps “Solutions” to the problem “wait” as Hughes suggests that this faux equality means that no actual racial progress is being made. While this allusion lends itself to a functional interpretation of the poem, Hughes refers to the Negro Problem and not [his] Negro Problem, which could be a point of the contention if the reader assumes Hughes is very intentional with his demarcations of
Sridutt Nimmagadda – Modern Poetry, Professor Meredith Martin
While reading Langston Hughes’ Dinner Guest: Me, I can’t help but wonder if the setting in the poem is the future Hughes’ character from I, Too (Sing America) desired: African-Americans now hold a place at the table. However, his wishes taken literally; the speaker may have a place at the dinner table, but racism is still present just as in so many of Hughes’ poems. However, the nature of this discrimination has evolved. Dinner Guest: Me features no imagery of the lynching and overt racism present in poems like Song for a Dark Girl and Gal’s Cry for a Dying Lover. Instead, we are introduced to a latent form of discrimination: Post-intentional racism. This very form of discrimination pervades contemporary discussion about race and culture in America today, rendering the comparatively little-known Dinner Guest: Me an …show more content…
This interpretation is corroborated by his hosts asking questions about racial affairs “demurely” and expressing guilt over their white background (1.5-1.14). This confirms Hughes’ argument because while nominal equality may have been reached (after all, an African-American can sit at a white dinner table), his hosts still fear him. He is not an equal to them, and so he is still being discriminated against. By this interpretation, perhaps “Solutions” to the problem “wait” as Hughes suggests that this faux equality means that no actual racial progress is being made. While this allusion lends itself to a functional interpretation of the poem, Hughes refers to the Negro Problem and not [his] Negro Problem, which could be a point of the contention if the reader assumes Hughes is very intentional with his demarcations of