In Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too,” the speaker refers to himself as “the darker brother.” In “A Black Man Talks of Reaping,” the speaker refers to the white man’s children as “my brother’s sons.” Why is it significant that the poets used the word brother? How do the two poems use the word differently?

Langston Hughes is one of the great African American novelists/poets of the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. In brief, the Harlem Renaissance was a period in the 1920s in which black America began to celebrate its rich and vibrant culture by producing new literature, music, and intellectual styles. Hughes was one of the foremost representatives of this cultural movement. African American contributors to the Harlem Renaissance did not intend for their publications to isolate black American culture from the rest of mainstream society, but rather to showcase the capacity for black Americans to contribute to the cultural vibrancy of the nation as a whole.
Hughes uses the word “brothers” in both of these poems precisely to avoid producing something that could be interpreted as an expression of black exceptionalism. A Black Man Talks of Reaping is the more pessimistic of the two as it showcases the disparity between the work that a black man puts into harvesting vegetation in compared to what he is entitled to once the seed has grown. The poem I, Too, Sing America, is more progressive, and sends a message of hope for a better future. When Hughes says, “They’ll see how beautiful I am, and be ashamed,” the point is not to be hopelessly disparaging of white America in its entirety, but rather to argue in favor of breaking down the artificial social barriers racist sentimentality has created. For too long has the black man’s potential been disregarded by mainstream society. In both cases, Hughes calls the white man his “brother” in order to bridge the distance between white and black people generally and encourage a mentality in which Americans of all colors could look at one another eye to eye, as brothers.