Addressing Inequality in the Land of Opportunity

The meaning or definition of what America is, was, or could become is the main subject that the two opposing voices relate in Langston Hughes’ poem Let America be America Again. Both voices acknowledge America is not the America that was envisioned by its founders/architects - i.e. a state built on the principles of freedom and equality, a land of opportunity for all.

However, while the first voice simply calls for a recovery of the ideal America, the second voice, through articulations of the reality of social inequalities in America, argues for a reexamination of the said ideal, with the desired effect of making America   “The land that never has been yet--/And yet must be--the land where every man is free.” (lines 19-20) “Let America be America again" (line 1) , the first speaker begins. To him, America was a dream of dreamers, a "great strong land of love" (line 7), where "opportunity is real, and life is free/equality is in the air we breathe". (line 13) He assertively states his notions of what America ought to be. However, he fails to identify what America has become instead. He also does not specify who the dreamers that dreamed America are, nor does he clarify who the "we" for whom equality. The choice of word “again” and the first speaker’s constant use of it suggest that to put America to its right direction, one needs to reacquaint the state to the glories it once had.

However the assertion of the second speaker of America as the “never was” contrasts the difference of position of the two speakers. The second speaker contests the possibility that America had been the place where equality once reigned as he mumbles back to the first speaker that  “(There's never been equality for me/Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’) (lines 15-16) The disillusionment or discontentment in the tone of the second speaker who claims he is one of “the people” who built America challenges the first speaker’s idealization of America’s past.

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The first speaker talks of freedom, equality for all but he/she could not even realize that there could be an opposition or challenge to his/her claims so he/she asks “Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? /And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?” (lines 17-18) when he/she hears mumbles as he/she spoke. The first speaker addresses the person as if their existence were hardly thought of as he/she talked about America’s past and future.

The second voice introduces himself: "I am” as the first voice is unable to recognize the second voice, who represents disenfranchised classes in America, the very reason America is not his ideal America, shows the first speaker's position in the society he seeks altered: he is an observer, not immersed in the reality of inequality and selective granting of rights, which the second voice knows first-hand.   Further on, he states that he (they) originated the dream of America. He briefly details America's founders - immigrants all, seeking escape from serfdom in the Old World, desiring a "home of the free’.

According to the second voice, as America was founded by immigrants, and its industries and agriculture were built and maintained by laborers, these members of American society have a historically-supported claim to the freedom and equality deprived of them. The second speaker calls for a collective action of the people to rebuild America to be a place for the people, the dreamers who could call it “the land of the free” and not just for the few privileged people.

The contesting ideas of the two voices/speakers in the poem about America stress that America as a country, as a word and even as a symbol for freedom and equality is a space of struggle between those who have the luxury to contemplate an abstract America and those who are immersed with the reality of how oppressive America is to the working classes and the ones with racial distinctions.

To one, America is the dream of vague dreamers meant for an unspecified mass. To the other, America is a state built by people wishing to escape oppression in their nations of origin. America could not just be painted in the perspective of one person and that discussion of freedom and equality could not be easily hoped for a country until one recognizes the problems faced by all sectors of the society.

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