Theme for English B: Analysis of the Speaker

The speaker of “Theme for English B” is a 22-year-old Black man who reflects on an assignment given to his English class by a white teacher. The speaker is enrolled at an institution he refers to as “this college on the hill above Harlem” (line 9), which likely refers to Columbia University. Although Black students would not form a significant demographic at Columbia until the 1960s, the university did allow students of color to enroll in the first half of the twentieth century. However, because the number of enrolled students of color remained low, Black scholars were always greatly outnumbered by their white peers. This is the case for the speaker of this poem, who explains that he is “the only colored student in [his] class” (line 10). The power dynamics involved in being the only Black student in a class full of white pupils and a white professor play a central role in the speaker’s searching exploration of race, identity, and belonging. These dynamics are at play from the very beginning, which foregrounds not the speaker’s words but the instructor’s: “The instructor said” (line 1).

Much of the speaker’s thinking circles around the question of what conditions his belonging in a white context like Columbia. As someone who attends a prestigious school in the white neighborhood of Morningside Heights, then returns home to the adjacent, historically Black neighborhood of Harlem, the speaker feels like an outsider. His outsider status leads to a concern about his ability (or inability) to write something “true” about himself, as his English teacher has requested. But what the speaker discovers as he sits down to draft his essay is that the social divisions created by racism are arbitrary, and they prevent folks like him and his classmates from seeing what unites them. As he puts the matter in the second stanza (lines 22–26):

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.

The thoughts in these lines eventually lead the speaker to a new understanding about racial identity and difference. That is, he realizes that to say something true about himself necessarily entails saying something true about his white peers and his white teacher, because they are connected. This is what the speaker means when he says, “You are white— / yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. / That’s American” (lines 31–33).