Joe Biden and what happens to a dream deferred.
The media are mostly useless at history so Joe Biden’s line in his Saturday victory speech ‘too many dreams have been deferred for too long’ has not been picked up on as far as I’ve seen. It can be read of course as a reference to Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech but the specific link is probably to Langston Hughes 1951 poem Harlem:
What happens to a dream deferred?
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?
Langston Hughes
The poem has resurfaced again with the Black Lives Matter movement this year and rightly so because the final line poses an important question.
A reference in a speech is of course no indicator of what Biden as President might or might not do even with Kamala Harris the first ever woman of colour to be Vice President.
Both Biden and Harris have interesting colonial backgrounds relating to the former British Empire which several historians have commented on. The media of course has not.
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