Black Gazes and White Liberals in Langston Hughes’s “Slave on the Block” and Claudia Rankine’s The White Card

Abstract

While scant critical attention has been paid to the thematic resonances between Langston Hughes and Claudia Rankine, they share a keen interest in using the power of the pen to expose and estrange white liberal hypocrisy. This article further establishes these resonances by placing Hughes’s short story “Slave on the Block,” from The Ways of White Folks (1934), in conversation with Rankine’s one-act play The White Card (2019). Reading Hughes and Rankine in tandem illuminates a decades-long concern with the role white patrons of Black art play in reifying racist narratives and contributing to, rather than dismantling, white hegemony. Utilizing what Tina Campt theorizes as a Black gaze, Hughes and Rankine, this article argues, encourage their white liberal audiences to take responsibility for their own patterns of exploitation and dehumanization within the world of Black art and culture and well beyond it.