The White House

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1919

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Impact of Racism

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. We do not read about denying Black people the right to vote or to live in certain neighborhoods or to hold certain jobs or to attend certain schools, what business establishments they could use, what churches they could attend, which restrooms they could use. We are not given stories of specific grievances, particular incidents of police harassment, vigilante lynchings, the routine humiliations in public places, or the rigged criminal proceedings, all elements of McKay’s Jim Crow era. Rather the poem investigates how that sort of racial hatred registers. The focus is not on the what but on the impact: the anger, the bitterness, the confusion over exactly the source of such white animosity. In this, the poem is less interested in haranguing white America as it is in reminding white America that Black Americans can tolerate only so much until anger will find its way to expression. You will reap, the poet reminds white America, exactly what you have sown. What you are doing, you are doing at your own moral peril. America, McKay reminds his era, is poisoning itself.

The Role of the Poet

The “I” who speaks the poem, who gives testimony to the grief of Black Americans in the 1920s, is and is not Claude McKay. The poem is bigger than Claude McKay, because the poem is an example of protest literature, social consciousness literature. It tackles a broad and profound culture-wide crisis with the expectation, really the hope, that it can affect genuine and immediate social change on a level larger than the individual.

For many, poets believing a sonnet can do what generations of politicians, activists, and community leaders cannot achieve is naïve—and certainly McKay’s poem can testify to that: More than a century later, Black leaders in America feel the same passions, wrath, and struggle like McKay’s poet to search for some insight into explaining how racism exists so easily with the concept of a democracy.

In this interrogation of a culture, McKay performs the public function of a poet. The poem does not explore private experiences of the poet, does not share confessional moments that elevate the poet to the center of the work. Rather, in the tradition of the New England Fireside Poets that dominated American poetry in the fin-de-siecle America, here is a Poet, capital P, addressing nothing less than the nation itself. But if those iconic white poets appeared generally benign, wonderfully satisfied with the conditions in their white culture, McKay in coopting the function of a public poet uses the forum to excoriate America in the hopes of realizing change. He is no Longfellow; he is no Whittier. As public poet, Longfellow and his ilk saw poetry as a chance to encourage quiet meditation. Poems were philosophical exercises intended to inspire better actions, a more moral life. McKay cannot afford such politeness. What must change here is not the individual reader but rather an entire corrupt culture shot through with the poison of racism.

Here the poet engages his cultural moment to trigger not just reflection (that’s more Longfellow) but awareness, an awareness that will make activism inevitable. See it, the poet demands, and you will want to change it. The poet seeks to be an inspiration to reject the status quo and to see the possibilities and the rewards of genuine change. True, the poet here seems pessimistic about that possibility, but the sonnet stands as a hopeful gesture nevertheless, a stop-gap moment against what the poet fears may be inevitable if that glass door stays locked.

The Psychology of Frustration

The poem is short on answers because McKay explores not the expectation of deliverance but rather the reality of frustration. The 13th Amendment outlawing slavery and the 14th Amendment guaranteeing civil rights to all Americans had been in place, the law of the land, for close to 70 years when McKay penned “The White House,” in which the poet despairs of ever being allowed entrance into white America. At the heart of McKay’s excoriation of America’s racism is the dark psychology of frustration, that is, how to handle the promise of equal rights deferred for so long.

The poem thus raises a series of anything-but-rhetorical questions that for McKay and his generation of what were then termed “colored” people each seemed to lead to a different kind of dead-end. Can an entire race simply give up, accept its frustration, and adjust to second-class citizenship? Can they live with anger? Can they sublimate depression and be sustained by a hope that grows more fragile—that is to say more ironic—generation to generation? Can they bring themselves to burn down the white house? Is rebellion the answer? What happens if decades of frustration lead to self-loathing and the loss of cultural esteem, what if Black people take the blame for their own treatment? Where do Black people find the superhero wisdom to restraint themselves when so much is there and so much is denied them when their only offense is the color of their skin not the content of their character?

Using the model of the Shakespearean sonnet, the closing couplet traditionally offers a tidy, elegantly clever resolution to the dilemma raised by the sonnet itself. But here McKay cannot—solutions themselves are frustrated. Anger, despondency, gloom, indifference, ignorance, optimism—each strategy in turn seems unworkable. The poem ends without concluding anything substantial, without making any bold statements for handling frustration, because there are no answers available, only the dire caution that keeping the heart of Black America safe from the hate in which it must live grows increasingly less likely.