Life & Wisdom Quote by James Weldon Johnson

Johnson is doing something deceptively risky here: he’s rescuing a Black cultural form that respectable society, including parts of the Black middle class, had been taught to treat as an embarrassment. The cakewalk began as enslaved Africans’ satirical mimicry of white plantation manners; by the time Johnson is writing and speaking into the early 20th century, it’s been repackaged for minstrel stages and white audiences as “comic” Blackness. That history leaves Black performers and strivers with a trap: either disown the form to signal refinement, or embrace it and risk being read through racist caricature.

Johnson refuses the trap. His “ashamed” is aimed at uplift politics and respectability culture, the era’s dominant survival strategy that tried to purchase dignity by policing taste. He’s not naive about how the cakewalk has been misused; the point is that shame is the wrong emotion because it concedes ownership. “Proud” is a provocation: it asks readers to remember the cakewalk’s original intelligence - a coded, communal joke at power’s expense - and to see artistic value where outsiders saw only spectacle.

The line also critiques cultural theft without needing the term. If white America can monetize a dance born from Black wit and endurance, Johnson implies, Black people don’t need to apologize for its existence; they need to claim it as evidence of creativity under constraint. It’s a tight piece of rhetorical jiu-jitsu: turning what was marketed as degradation back into authorship, history, and agency.