The White House

Although the psychology of bitterness and anger reflected in McKay’s poem can be (and has been) applied to many groups who within the culturally diverse American community have experienced this same hunger to be a part of America, and who have struggled with that sense of alienation and displacement (women, the underprivileged, the undereducated, first-generation immigrants, members of the LGBTQ community), the poem here specifically addresses how white America systematically and legally denied basic civil rights to its Black citizens. In this, the poem examines the reality of segregation, how Black people were considered part of America—and a valuable and viable part given the forced and unforced labor they contributed—but somehow (and the logic clearly escapes the poet here) at the same time not a part of America.

The poem resists cataloguing specific examples of the era’s segregation—and McKay, who lived in both New York City and the Deep South after leaving Jamaica, could easily have given powerful testimony to how segregation manifested itself—the poem resists that kind of documentary realism. There are no examples pulled from McKay’s experiences or from the newspapers. That would make the poem timely, perhaps, but in this argument the poem aspires to a broader thematic focus.