“Cora Unashamed”: Relationships and Their Racial Implications

Abstract

Injustice, oppression, and bad treatment are among those habits that have been lingering in societies that many writers have been trying hard to address throughout the ages. Among those writers is Langston Hughes in his story “Cora Unashamed” where he has boldly presented the real struggle of black people with a white system.

“Cora Unashamed” appeared in his work The Ways of White Folks (ed. 1971). The important relationship in this story is that of the white and black races; in the story, Cora represents the blacks while the Studevants and their daughter are white. Worth mentioning is the male-female relationship in this story. By exploring the concept of racial master-slave relationship and studying the idea of the whites’ superiority, the paper aims at scrutinizing how the whites use racism and slavery to approve their domination over the blacks. Besides, it investigates the impacts of slavery and racism on the blacks. Close-reading method is employed to analyze the story. Besides, the contextual method which focuses on intrinsic and extrinsic elements is utilized. The result of the analysis shows that race helps in the whites’ domination over other minorities, particularly the blacks. In other respect, master-slave relationships have their great negative economic impacts on the poor people.