Theme for English B Race Quotes

One of the first things our speaker tells us about himself is that he is black. He considers this to be an important part of who he is, and important for us to know, before we read. Think about how your race defines you, and how your friends' races define them. When you interact or have a conversation with someone of a different race, does it change anything? Is race important to your identity? Those are the questions our speaker is thinking about throughout this poem. Sometimes, it seems as if people are scared to talk about race, because they're worried about being politically correct. Not so our speaker. He tackles the issue head on.

Our speaker is a minority of one. Think about any time you've been a minority of one—maybe you've been the only black person in a group of white people, like our speaker, or vice versa. Or maybe you've been the only boy in a group of girls, or vice versa. How has that made you feel? Now, imagine what it must have been like for our speaker in the 1950s, when this poem was published. He's a young black male, breaking through boundaries that some white people took great pains to construct. It's very likely that some of his fellow students did not want him to be in that class, and harbored racist feelings towards him. Yet here, our speaker isn't talking about how being the only black person makes him feel. He's just stating the fact, and we can guess what it must have been like.

Basically, our speaker is taking a roundabout way of saying, "Hey, you know, black and white people like the same sort of stuff—sleep, music, good company." It's telling of the racism of the time period that he has to go out of his way to make this point. Here, he's also tying his race back to his writing assignment, using a clever pun to ask if his page, white before it's written on, will, like his skin, be colored.