In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," poet Langston Hughes interprets the statement of a young African-American poet that, "I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet," to mean, "I want to write like a white poet"; this suggests he was really expressing a subconscious desire to be white. Hughes goes on to argue that this apparent aspiration to bourgeois gentility, as embodied by the dominant Caucasian society, and the psychological cost that adherence to its constraints on creative freedom implies, is terribly damaging to the quality of the creative work and to the spiritual integrity of any African American artist who would embrace it. And it only adds insult to injury that not only does white society pressure African American artists to conform to its standards, but his own people often share the same attitude: "Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are, . . . "
