Hughes assigned Black artists the task of converting assimilationist desire into antiracist pride

Evidence

The Negro artist did not have to touch “on the relations between Negroes and whites.” The only duty Hughes dropped onto the “younger Negro artist” was to “change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white,’ hidden in the aspirations of his people, to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful”—and “ugly too.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 841

Categorization

• XREF: Hughes’s artistic re-education project pairs with the reader’s use-case: using art to unseat internalized assimilationism rather than to argue with white segregationsists.