Parenting & Family Quote by Arna Bontemps

A dare sits at the center of Bontemps's line, and it lands like a slap because it names the everyday machinery of cultural policing: not just the obvious authorities (parents, teachers), but the genteel enforcer who pretends to be above it all, the "merely literary critic". That "merely" is doing sly work. It shrinks the critic from arbiter of taste to petty gatekeeper, the kind who smuggles racial hierarchy in through diction and decorum.

"Act colored" is the trap phrase. It echoes a long history of white America demanding performance on its terms: be legible, be safe, be the acceptable version of yourself. Bontemps turns it inside out. The scandal isn't that he is "colored"; it's that someone would demand he subtract it. His outrage is aimed at respectability politics before we had the term: the pressure to translate Black life into neutral, "universal" art, as if universality were just whiteness with better PR.

The list of speakers also sketches a life cycle of constraint. Home and school discipline the body; criticism disciplines the imagination. For a Harlem Renaissance poet, that last arena mattered intensely: Black writers were praised when their work looked like an audition for inclusion, scolded when it sounded too vernacular, too folk, too explicitly racial. Bontemps's intent is not to romanticize identity as costume, but to claim aesthetic sovereignty: to write from Blackness without apology, without sanitizing the cadence, the subject matter, or the social anger that produced it. The line refuses assimilation as a prerequisite for art.