Discuss the Langston Hughes poem, "Cross."

Like so much of Hughes' poetry, "Cross" is about an
exploration of one's identity.  The poem is reflective and rooted in rumination about
one's own sense of self and how race and ethnicity play a vital role in the construction
of how one sees themselves and how others see them.  The inspiration for it comes from
individuals who are born to different racial compositions.  These are beings who have
different feet in different racial or ethnic worlds and carry the diaspora of such
experiences within themselves.  In a world of binary opposition, where roles are clearly
defined for one group or another, individuals who carry the blood of different
narratives in their own psyches carry with themselves a new form of expression.  We get
this through the poem.  The inspiration for this might come from Hughes' own
background.  Both of his parents were "mixed," meaning that their racial compositions
came from different expressions.  Hughes' himself was the same, being of African-
American, Caucasian, and Native American descent.  This left a profound impact on Hughes
because it made the search for identity a challenging element that defied simple and
conventional means of articulation.  We can see this in the poem, when the speaker's
emotions vacillates between hated, poignancy, and a sense of liminality in the world in
"being white nor black."