McKay flourished as a poet during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. During this time, his poems challenged white authority while celebrating Jamaican culture. He also wrote tales about the trials and tribulations of life as a black man in both Jamaica and America. McKay was not secretive about his hatred for racism,[26] and felt that racist people were stupid, shortsighted, and possessed with hatred.[22] In tales such as Home to Harlem (1928), his depictions were initially criticized as a negative portrayal of Harlem and its lower-class citizens by prominent figures such as W. E. B. DuBois, but McKay was later applauded as a literary force in the Harlem Renaissance.[27]
Among his works that challenged racial discrimination is the poem "If We Must Die" (1919), a call for his people to fight with determination and courage against those who would murder them.[28][29]
McKay divested himself from many aspects and growing prescriptions of modernism. By the beginning of the 20th century, the sonnet form had become an antiquated poetic style, but McKay found it an ideal medium to convey his ideas. Many modernists, however, rejected and criticized his use of the sonnet.[30] Despite their reaction, he persevered and created a significant number of modern sonnets.
Having spent time among the artists of Paris in the 1920s, he was intimately acquainted with the dynamics between painters and models and how modernist painters presented African subjects and African culture. In her article "Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys", Leah Rosenberg writes: "The fascination with African art and its identification with female sexuality was characteristic of modernist and avant-garde primitivism".[31] The inclination to stereotype and caricature the African physical form created, however inadvertently, a form of hegemony reminiscent to McKay of the colonialism he grew up within Jamaica. "Sexuality and black culture," Rosenberg explains, "held a privileged place in modernist and avant-garde art from Picasso to Gertrude Stein". In need of money, McKay posed nude for the Cubist painter André Lhote. Through his experience, McKay saw first-hand how the larger social hegemony between European white supremacy and people of Afro-Caribbean descent could play itself out between the artist and its subject. McKay critically recalled the experience in various ways in many of his most notable works. In doing so, he shone a critical light on a cornerstone of modernism and once again pushed back against a system in which he found himself.
