Analysis Of Langston Hughes's The Negro Artist And The Racial Mountain

Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” as quoted by Hilton Als in “The Sojourner,” contains a passage acknowledging that he and his friends “know we are beautiful. And ugly too”. Here, Hughes proclaims an idea that transcends the boundaries of race and language - the pride in having survived through generations of institutionalized pain. Hughes is proud of his black identity not despite the world devaluing his blackness, but with the knowledge that this devaluation has not broken his spirit. He acknowledges that his life does not come from a lineage of people who have had easy lives, but that this does not need to define his individual existence. Hughes describes a state of being “free within ourselves,” a personal acceptance that allows him to see himself as beautiful even while the world insists he can only be ugly.
Hughes’s acknowledgement of ugliness can also be found in the Haitian declaration of “nou led nou la.” The phrase itself is in a Creole patois and
The word “queer” did not originate as a self-identifier, but as a general term for “strange” that came to be used pejoratively against gay men and gender-nonconforming people. Its reclamation was aided by the anonymous 1990 flier entitled “Queers Read This,” which contains a section entitled “Shout!” that calls upon its readers to “Be proud. Do whatever you need to do to tear yourself away from your customary state of acceptance. Be free” even as the rest of the pamphlet is a demand for action. Self-acceptance is radical when that self is considered detestable, a perception that the pamphlet does not try to obscure. The section “Why Queer?” states that the reason for this is in part because “‘queer’ is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world,” acknowledging the ugliness, the stigma, and the hatred that the queer community