Biden, Racial Justice and a Dream Deferred 
June 6, 2020.
Black Lives Matter march in Washington, DC following the
police
killing of George Floyd.
"A cry for racial justice, some
400 years in the making, moves us.
The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer."
- President Joe Biden,
Inaugural Address, January 20, 2021 What happens
to a dream deferred? In 1951,
the African American poet Langston Hughes wrote a poem by this name
subsequently published in his book titled Harlem. The poem
follows.
Does
it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like
a sore -
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten
meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe
it just sags
like a heavy load. Or
does it explode? "We can deliver racial justice,"
President Joe Biden said in his inaugural address. Certainly one has
cause to wonder how a constitutional order that has repeatedly failed
to provide racial justice and equality for all members of society will
now "deliver racial justice." Biden also refers to
Lincoln and the Civil War saying, "In
another January in Washington, on New Year's Day in 1863, Abraham
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper,
the president said -- and I quote -- 'If my name ever goes down into
history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.'
"My whole soul is in it. Today, on this January day, my whole
soul is in this: Bringing America together, uniting our people and
uniting our nation." But Lincoln did not deliver,
in the sense that the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not emancipate
the African Americans enslaved -- they together with workers opposed to
slavery did that themselves. As Langston Hughes' colleague W.E.B.
Dubois put it, the Civil War and Reconstruction were a general strike
and an effort by workers, black and white, south and north, to carry
forward the elimination of all enslavement. 
January 19,
2021. Flags are set up in front of the Capitol building replacing
people for the Biden inauguration. Biden
leaves out that the flowering of democracy that took place during
Reconstruction (1865-1877) was brutally crushed by the constitutional
order, as has occurred repeatedly since then, including in efforts this
past summer. Or that Madison, among the "white men of property" who
wrote the Constitution, specifically said it was necessary to design it
so that the majority, also called the "mob" or the "propertyless
majority," could not gain power. Perhaps this is who Biden was
referring to when he said no "riotous mob" could ever "drive us from
this sacred ground... It will never happen. Not today, not tomorrow,
not ever." It is a statement that he and the narrow private interests
he represents will not cede power to the people, which is what history
demands. The poem by Hughes puts forward that a
dream deferred explodes. Perhaps it is this explosion that most worries
Biden. He seems to think the large majority accept the limitation of
dreams and empty promises when they have shown in action that they are
stepping up their organized fight for equality and accountability, as
human beings in the here and now.
This article was published in
Volume 51 Number 2 - February 7, 2021
Article Link:
Biden, Racial Justice and a Dream Deferred
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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