In the America we live in today, there is a suppressed but very present racial ghost that haunts us all. Over the years, much time, work and money has gone into an attempt to eradicate any racial prejudice present in the country especially towards black people. Nevertheless, it is obvious that there is still that racial divide amongst Americans and no matter how much we strive for equality, the white male will always be more equal than others. This is because unconsciously, America as a whole dictates which race is superior based on skin color. This is something that wasn’t established by the present generation, but by the very ancestors who decided that the black man was only worthy enough to be called a slave, thereby automatically and forever making him a second class citizen. This has in turn caused some people to deny their native culture whenever possible in a bid to fit into the superior race as seen in Langston Hughes essay. The more astonishing thing however is that even in societies where skin color is of no essence, there is still that tendency to belong in the alpha class. Generally in America, when you meet someone for the first, see someone on the street or judge the actions of an individual, the first thing you notice about the person is their race, or rather their skin color. It so happens that the two (race and skin color), though they have entirely different definitions, mean the same thing to the average American. Perhaps if the early Americans had gone to Asia to acquire slaves then race would mean hair color. But they didn’t and the single most obvious difference between a slave and a white man back then was the color of their skin. This marker became the symbol of freedom and America has gone along with it ever since. Now growing up in a time and a society where you had to give up your seat for another man because you were black and he white must have been hellish. It is not something that any man black or white would wish upon himself let alone his children so it is not out of the ordinary to believe that many blacks would jump at the chance of being white, however possible that is. Not that they would bleach their skin because most of them couldn’t even afford to, but they would try to identify with the white man and the white culture by any means possible. Langston Hughes does a good job of pointing this out in his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”. Hughes grew up in a time when issues concerning racial segregation where still very fresh and being a black poet himself didn’t hesitate to inform his audience of what it felt like to be black. He describes the parents of his fellow poet as black people who were trying desperately to be