The White House

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1919

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

In the best of all possible worlds, it would be a good indicator of American social and cultural progress to say a poem as angry, as discontented, as gloomy as “The White House” needed historic context, that McKay’s outrage against racism and widespread discrimination in America now required footnotes to give it meaning—sadly, that is far from the case. America still struggles with entrenched racism, which now uses the reach of social media and the darkest corners of the web to make immediate the insidious logic of replacement theory (the racist belief that liberals are trying to replace/overwhelm conservative white voters with voters and/or immigrants of color) that makes inevitable the frustration, bitterness, and anger that McKay writes about. Despite seeming to be perpetually on the verge of at last a day of racial reckoning, an epiphany into the cannibal logic of racism in America, the cycle continues. The toxic logic of hate remains in racially-divided contemporary America, as real and as threatening as it was in McKay’s Jim Crow America.

“The White House” is a product of and a response to what is now termed the Segregation Era in the long history of America’s troubled race relations. For most of the first 30 years of the new century, state and local governments, primarily in the Deep South but in the North as well, crafted legislation designed to maintain segregation between the races, to prevent Black people from accessing education and employment opportunities as well as voting rights. The pernicious logic of separate but equal sustained legislation that routinely restricted the civil rights of Black citizens. In addition, throughout the South, a network of vigilante terrorists, most associated with the Ku Klux Klan, maintained a system of repression through violence and the threat of violence. With the founding of the NAACP in 1909, Black citizens began to agitate for their rights. In the years leading up to McKay’s poem, Black people had begun to migrate from the South for better employment opportunities in the North only to find the same kind of repressive legislation. When Black individuals became an element of the armed forces deployed to Europe in the last year of World War One, these soldiers returning home found it difficult to square their service for a country that still refused to recognize them as full citizens.

But importantly, in the North, Black citizens were given better access to voting, and it became clear that the era of segregation would change through efforts at the ballot box. It was into that hopeful atmosphere that McKay wrote his poem, a poem that cautioned how after years of being routinely denied rights, Black discontent was at last going to be recognized.

Literary Context

The literary context of “The White House” seems a bit incongruous. It is, after all, a sonnet that carefully abides by the rules of rhythm and rhyme set centuries earlier by white poets. More to the point, it is a Shakespearean sonnet, traditionally associated with great passion, love, and the joyous triumphs and fragile failures of the vulnerable heart. It seems ironic that Black outrage and Black discontent over racism in white America would be expressed by a first-generation Jamaican immigrant in a poetic form that dates back nearly four centuries to a very white Elizabethan England. Even more unusual was that McKay himself was a self-taught autodidact whose most successful poems to this point captured the unique rhythms and colorful sonic effects of island dialects. That literary context is even more puzzling given that the conventional subject of Shakespearean sonnets were romantic love, sexual attraction, and the fetching gift of beauty, not the evils of social injustice, economic inequities, and racial bitterness.

So why a Shakespearean sonnet? It seems distinctly out of place in a literary movement termed the Harlem Renaissance. Surely following the conventions of white literature would be perceived as yet another way to oppress Black people. The literary context, however, is critical to understanding McKay’s difficult position, a Black man in a white America uncertain over the future of race. If the point of McKay’s argument is to reassure white America that, despite their despicable and amoral treatment of an entire race, Black people are not the “savages” white America wants them to be, then the literary context gifts McKay’s anger added intellectual and cultured discourse. Yes, we are bitter; yes, we are angry and hurt, but that bitterness, that anger, and that hurt we are sharing in impeccably metered lines and in the elevated diction and complex syntax associated with educated white people. It is anger disciplined into iambic pentameter; rage manifested in a careful, clever, and established rhyme scheme. We know McKay had the ear for the music and lilt of vernacular languages, that he opts here to express his anger in the elevated diction and careful form of a classic sonnet would suggest to white America that their racist fears, uncertainties, and paranoia over the so-called “Black menace” were misplaced and unfounded. It also reinforces the fact that intelligence, progress, and creativity are not relegated to any specific race, culture, or ethnicity.