Answer: “Theme for English B” is a poem about the complexities of identity in a racist society. Its speaker—a black student at Columbia University in the 1950s—receives an apparently straightforward assignment: to write one page about himself. But that raises complicated questions for the speaker about his identity, about the relationship between black and white people, and about what it means to be American. As he works through these questions, the speaker arrives at a powerful argument against racism—and for his own place in American life. Black and white are not truly separate, the speaker argues; instead, they are each “part” of the other.