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Theme For English B Essay

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“Theme for English B” is a poem by Langston Hughes in which a black student who studies in a predominantly white university is given an assignment. The assignment is to write a page that comes from the heart, because that way, according to his instructor, it will be true. In the poem the student constantly tries to tell his instructor through his paper that even though he is black, he does the same things as white people. The student goes to great lengths to try and get his point across to his instructor, which is that even though his skin is black, he is not different than other students in his class. His skin color certainly does not make him any different than his white instructor either. The narrator gives us examples of how even though he is colored; he has many similarities with people from other races: I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem.
Like many other students who are not colored, he went to school in his hometown and later moved to go to college. This is where the narrator starts trying to prove to us that he is not different from the other students and his instructor. He is just another person who is trying to live his life and accomplish his goals. Black people also have ambitions and goals that they would …show more content…

It literally is just the color of a person’s skin and that’s it, nothing more and nothing less. Having colored skin does not make you better, worse or any different than white people even though you might be in a minority. It is clear that skin color is an issue for the narrator and since it is something that he cannot control he is trying to deal with it in the best way he can, which is proving to his instructor that he is not different than white people and he does it by providing similarities to

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