A Dream Deferred: Or Plausible Answer to A Rhetorical Question?

(+) A Dream Deferred: Or Plausible Answer to A Rhetorical Question?

May 05, 2006 at 08:24:12 America/Los_Angeles

(Mazola Files Editorial Note this post doesn't make much sense without the pictures: they were pictures of African Americans wrapped in flags during the Katrina disaster)



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 question’s been on the table for a number of days now. I don’t think the person who originally posed it considered it a rhetorical one—and yet, it would indeed be foolish for anyone with a reasonably reality-based grip on the fabric of American society today to expect that an answer to the question be forthcoming. Not now. Not ever.

What the hell? Windmills are my friends, so I’ll post it again. For rhetoric’s sake:

Why should securing rights for illegal immigrants be a higher priority for any of us than addressing the ongoing issues for African-American low skilled workers, particularly male, that are merely made worse by illegal immigration?


myleftasscheek :: A Dream Deferred: Or Plausible Answer to A Rhetorical Question?
And as a platform to draw readers’ attention to a partial answer that I found in an LA Times OpEd by Erin Aubry Kaplan the other day.

The author doesn’t offer us any direct answers to the question (to do so would be ‘impolite’, I suppose, and a guarantee for non-publication of his views or being run out of town on a rail), but he does direct attention to something I’ve been thinking a lot about these days: the flags, and the role they play in liberal America’s most recent staging and performance of its “Hoorah for the Underdog!”-complex—the less-than-conscious cathartic release that inevitably follows on the heels of any great national tragedy that serves to remind us how far we have not come in terms of racial and economic justice—like Katrina.

Kaplan writes:

Although plenty of marchers waved the red, white and green, along with the colors of other Latin American countries, the preponderance of U.S. flags was striking. Far from subverting the Stars and Stripes or fashioning it into a symbol of resistance, as in the 1960s, Latino demonstrators treated the flag with matter-of-fact reverence. They simply held the flag aloft or alongside the flags of their nations. Those who wrapped themselves in Old Glory did so sincerely; they were literally wrapping themselves in the fabric of an American dream that they felt they had a hand in making. To desecrate the flag would have been to desecrate the can-do ideals of American opportunity many Latinos hold dear, low wages and poor working conditions notwithstanding.

No Hendrix-hijinks here. Nosirreee. Unending gratitude, deference to the ideal of the American Dream that has been a nightmare to so many.

“What's more American, or mythologized as more American, than hard work?,” Kaplan asks, and you can almost hear the cogwheels of ego-stroking, the machinery of feel-good Americanism engaging in his readers. See? Some of them still love us. Some of them still think this is the greatest country on earth—despite its flaws. Still. To this day, they flock to our shores. The huddled masses. The tired, the poor. Still, they are knocking on our door. We must be something real special!

And Kaplan concedes, as anyone with half a brain must do: “By that measure, Latinos have more than earned their membership in the club.”

And yet, delicately stepping around the fragile edges of the American collective psyche, Kaplan does manage to unearth a handful of “truth dust”:


But there's the rub: "earning" the right to be a U.S. citizen and, more profoundly, an American. Paying your dues, logging your hours. It's a curious, wholly capitalistic approach to citizenship, and it's gaining currency among Latinos and their supporters. Some of the signs I saw Monday made the argument in shorthand. "Immigrants Built This Country — That's It," read one. "Pilgrims Were Immigrants!" declared another.

Ah yes, the Pilgrims, the folks who gave the United States its fabled Puritan work ethic. A work ethic so revered, so uniquely American, that immigrants need only subscribe to it to become an American. The only problem with this notion, of course, is that it didn't apply to Native Americans and blacks. Indians were unwilling and dying off, so African blacks were imported for slave labor that built the American economy in its crucial first 200 years or so. Can't get much more industrious than that.

Although slavery has long since ended, racism remains — and black employment has never been as noble or as resonant a cause as that of the immigrant worker. It is an orphaned cause still looking for something or someone to take it up. Blacks who've more than earned their "Americanness" are still trying to make that point today.

But it is here that Kaplan provides what seems to me the most plausible answer to the question posed here, now in rhetorical terms—

I realized Monday that there is no place to make it in this movement. A few frustrated blacks have tried, taking up the flag to assert the validity of their Americanness over that of their Latino neighbors — a move that could not help but look reactionary rather than visionary. It doesn't much matter, because blacks are not needed. Latino immigrants are diverse, numerous and politically astute. Blacks are even losing their historic and symbolic role as a mirror of the nation's conscience; another group now holds a mirror that is less damning and easier for the nation to gaze into.

By the end of the morning protest, I was deeply impressed. I also felt deeply invisible. I drove home along a South L.A. main street that, with Latino businesses shuttered and blacks milling about in a kind of vacuum, was quieter and emptier than I'd ever seen it.

There’s the answer, staring up at us from the page:

another group now holds a mirror that is less damning and easier for the nation to gaze into

And the answer’s been there all along really. I mean which American flag would you rather try to wrap your head around?
This one?

Or this one?

How about this one?

Yeah. Those were rhetorical questions. We all know the answer. These other images are prettier, and therefore preferable. It doesn't hurt as much to look at them. They don't scream at us with ugly truths. The American Nightmare. Dreams deferred, bursting in flight. The rocket's red glare. But the flag is still there.

Wake me up when it's over, for now, I'll focus on the American Dream:

As always, a picture is worth 1,000 words. Apparently, unless it's a pretty one, that's all it's worth.
And talk is cheap, even at half the price.

Let's at least be honest about it: neither the question nor the dream has been "deferred." Both have been dismissed. As done for. For some of us, it is clear: the nightmare is never going to end, and it's really not the rocket's red glare our fellow Americans choose to either fear or revere. No. It's the blank stare of "blackness" writ large on a slate that is anything but clean.