Langson Hughes's thesis in his essay "The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain" is that the African-American artist cannot create true art, nor escape racism, if the African American is afraid of his own blackness, wanting to be white instead. To illustrate his point, he opens by expressing sorrow over the fact that a "young Negro poet" once said to him, "I want to be a poet--not a Negro poet," which Hughes logically concludes really means, "I would like to be white." Hughes asserts that the young African American will never be a "great poet" so long as he is afraid of himself.

An additional point Hughes uses to illustrate his argument is a reference to a "Philadelphia clubwoman," meaning a professional woman singer at a jazz club in Philadelphia, who once asked Hughes, "What makes you do so many jazz poems?" In Hughes's mind, in asking him that, she is snubbing jazz as something her race created without recognizing its significance. As Hughes explains, jazz is important to the African-American race because it developed out of the "eternal tom-tom beating" in the African American's soul as he fought against the forced labors of the white man's world. In rejecting jazz or anything else as being "too Negro," she is rejecting herself as a Negro and all that makes a Negro beautiful.

Hughes concludes by arguing that the African American must recognize and embrace what is both beautiful and ugly about himself in order to achieve true freedom.