Morgan Tuscherer

30 March 2015
White Ascendancy in When the Negro Was in Vogue
In Langston Hughes 1940 essay When the Negro Was in Vogue the Harlem
Renaissance is discussed in light of a myriad of racial issues. One specific issues seems to be key
to Hughes, and that is white-over-color ascendancy, which can be described as white people,
either consciously or not, assuming people of color exist to serve their psychological and
economic purposes (Delgado and Stefancic). Hughes talks about clubs in Harlem attracting white
people and how the blatant racism in that forced black Harlem residents to move the parties into
their own homes. The parties, called house-rent or whist parties, were where black culture
thrived after being forcibly moved from the clubs in Harlem.
Delgado and Stefancic write in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction that white-overcolor ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material. Hughes focuses on the
material, or economic, purpose in his essay specifically when he talks about whites using Harlem
as a source of entertainment. On page 2104 he says that people came to stare at the Negro
customers like amusing animals in a zoo, and they thought that the Negroes loved to have
them there. He is emphasizing that they as human beings were being treated like animals: white
people paid money to come and literally gawk at them night after night. He also writes that
Negro writers [] ceased to write to amuse themselves and began to write to amuse and
entertain white people (2105), which shows, once again, that the art coming out of Harlem
served as an economic advantage to white people. This eliminated a lot of the creativity and
authenticity that could have existed in this art and ended up being more oppressive than a lot of
people thought. To emphasize that point even further Hughes states the ordinary Negroes hadnt
heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadnt raised their wages any (2106). This
part of the Harlem Renaissance, to Hughes, was just a moneymaking spectacle to further
perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
Another key point in white-over-color ascendancy is that racism advances the interests
of both white elites and working-class people which in turn offers little incentive to eradicate
it (Delgado and Stefancic). Hughes talks about white people coming to Harlem in droves and
watching the colored people amuse themselves (2104); this entertainment was apparently
impossible to resist for white people and so why would they want to do anything to change
anything about it? From here Hughes discusses how the Harlem community eventually took this
into their own hands to change what they could. He writes that non-theatrical, non-intellectual
Harlem was an unwilling victim of its own vogue and was a place to avoid being stared at by
white folks (2106). This new space for Harlem creativity was called house-rent parties. These
parties were a safe and uncensored outlet for music and dancing. They were a place where black
people could do the black-bottom with no stranger behind you trying to do it, too (2106). To
Hughes this was the preferred alternative to the blatant racist tactics of white people invading
Harlem clubs.
When the Negro Was in Vogue speaks volumes about the attempts white people made
to capitalize on black culture in Harlem. A key theme in his essay is white-over-color ascendancy
as described by critical race theory. Harlems culture was sold to white people as a spectacle and
forced the black artists to relocate in order to keep authenticity in their art.

Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New
York University Press, 2001. Print.
Hughes, Langston. When the Negro Was in Vogue. The Heath Anthology of American
Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Wadsworth, 2014. 2103-2109. Print.