Langston Hughes’s “I,Too” is an assertion and affirmation of the black ego that has been always relegated . It is an attempt to subvert the dialectical pair white/black.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed–

I, too, am America.

Hughes penned the poem at the age of 22 in the city of Genoa in 1924.The title of the poem by Langston Hughes has the black ego asserting itself. “I” stands for the ego. But the ego is not egoistic here as it declares: ”I, too.” The speaker wants a place at par with the whites.

America as a country has always been represented by the whites. The innumerable blacks that inhabit the country are relegated as citizens owing to the practice of Apartheid. Just as the East, they are viewed as ’the Other.” In their own country, they are attributed only second-class citizen status.

Singing is an expression of freedom. Walt Whitman emblematizes the action of singing in “I hear America Singing” as an affirmation of being American.…