This chapter attempts to focus on the identity problem faced by African Americans in America. He thus investigates the dilemma of African American identity as shown in the poetry of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. At the same time, it provides a solution to the problem of alienation and identity crisis of African Americans. But while McKay's self-rejection of his blackness drives him to chart his search for identity in exile, Hughes's self-acceptance of his blackness allows him to reconcile with the white oppressors who have dispossessed the black race of his identity. Furthermore, it sheds light on the psychological consequences of violating the African American's identity. Furthermore, this chapter shows the self-debasement, helplessness, and double consciousness of the African American that comes from the sense of uprootedness. After living through the long and harrowing experience of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in America, African Americans suffered from a sense of uprootedness due to the loss of their identity. Thus, by accepting the distorted image imposed on him by American society, the African American is forced to lead a life of double consciousness. Thus, the black race suffered from an estrangement and social displacement in the American world:… a world which provides them with no true self-consciousness, but only allows them to see themselves through the revelation of the other world. It is a particular sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul with the yardstick of a world that looks with amused contempt and pity. One always feels his duplicity: an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts......middle of paper......Furthermore, the antithesis in “nice big house” and “shack” reflects the unbridgeable gulf between the two races. At the same time, it aggravates the problem of segregation and racial discrimination that African Americans suffer from. Meanwhile, words such as "wonder", "neither", and "nor" show Hughes' bitter sense of estrangement as he is unable to determine which race he belongs to. Therefore, the poem is also a reminder by Hughes to his people of the tragic consequences of this social system on mulatto offspring who have no place in either race. In this poem, Hughes dramatizes the inherent tensions of a mulatto who is affected by his mixed origins and attributes his failure in life to them. While initially blaming his parents for his dilemma, Hughes ends up forgiving them and pitying his dislocation and disenfranchisement from American society..