How can being a white female matter in how you read "Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes, or does it matter at all? Do you think these...

This is such an interesting question!  I do not want to hedge in my answer, but there are ways in which it does matter and ways it does not matter.  I will certainly explain that as I go along. The keys to understanding the poem are in the audience and in the use of the second person.   

What I asked myself first as I decided to respond to this question is to whom is Hughes addressing his poem.  As a matter of common sense, he surely anticipates a readership well beyond one older English teacher, so on one level, it does not matter at all.  He is not really "talking" to this person.  But on another level, it matters a great deal.  It is quite likely that he did have a white English teacher, and he may very well have been the only student of color in the classroom.  This is the person he has in his mind as he writes his "truth."  And this person is a symbol of what may not be exactly racism, but of the larger world that has no insight into young people who are "other." 

As someone who has been that white, older English teacher, certainly, I understand the poem in a way that is different from someone who has not been in that position. For example, there is the slight mocking of the teacher's advice,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true (lines 2-5).

English teachers are prone to giving advice like this or saying things like "Write what you know."  These are not always the most helpful of instructions for students.  And as someone white and far older than the African-American students I have had in class, Hughes also needs this teacher as his foil, so to speak, to make the point that "truth" is likely to be quite different for him from the truth of his teacher, as he says,

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age...(lines 16-17).

So, in addition to mocking these instructions, he is also making clear the idea that they are unlikely to have the same "truth."  

However, I can't imagine that anyone else's understanding of the poem is diminished in some way by not being a white English teacher because while on one level, Hughes is addressing that teacher, on another level, he is asking the reader to understand how it is to be a black student in a white world, with a very different kind of truth from those around him.  A white reader who is not an English teacher is fully capable of understanding this, and a black reader can often easily identity with these feelings, even today.  He is saying to the reader, "I am other," and "This is part of my truth." 

Using the second person point of view, Hughes accomplishes a great deal. First, so many students write in the second person, as though they were addressing their teacher only. This makes his poem feel like an authentic student response.  Second, using the second person point of view gives the poem some immediacy that it would lack if Hughes had written all of this information in the third person point of view, saying, for instance, "My teacher is older and white."  Finally, the use of the second person point of view provides a direct and personal relationship with the reader, a familiarity that really makes us feel he is speaking directly to us.  I think the success of the poem depends to some degree on the direct address to the teacher. 

So, you see, it matters not at all whether or not the reader is a white English teacher, puts him or herself in the shoes on a white English teacher, or simply reads the poem as a human being.  The poem works because it is on two levels, first, what feels like an authentic response from a student who is "other," and second, because every reader can gain some empathy and insight into what this feels like.  It is one of my favorites of his and always has been.  Perhaps I have a bias because of my background!