Bop By Langston Hughes

Bop By Langston Hughes

Bop begins as a casual conversation between two men about a music they called Bop.  The narrator is clearly a person in a social class than the other man, or Simple.  The narrator confuses two different types of Bop and Simple has to explain it to him.  One has been used by white people while the other came from a sad history of police brutality against black people.  Simple then explains to the narrator that white people cannot imitate Be-Bop because they haven’t gone through the pain that others have.  They haven’t been wronged by law or questioned where they were going due to the color of their skin.  Langston Hughes understands the fear and struggles victims of police brutality himself because he was a man of color during the 1900s, a time when racism was present.  He was also an early writer of jazz poetry.  Hughes faced racism in his time and this caused him to educate the public about what his people went through.  Fighting ignorance with poetry helped get his point across well.  His essay provokes the reader to think about how those of different races have gone through completely different tragedies and black people certainly have more history with racism and some racism present today.  This essay applies to young and old generation that may not have been educated on the struggles of the past.  But for sure, Langston Hughes wants readers to know that ignoring history or not understanding it is careless.  This point is proven when his final sentences hit readers’ hearts with emotion.  “Your explanation depresses me,’ I said.  ‘Your nonsense depresses me,’ said Simple.”  Hughes uses pathos to make the reader feel guilt that the narrator’s lack of knowledge and maybe even sympathy offends those brutality victims.  Hughes also uses Simple’s story of how he gets beat just for the color of his skin in order to make the reader feel for the ones who listen to Be-Bop and created it.  Emotion helps make the author’s message more important and can give readers who may not know much a call to action.