Baltimore protesters
Between David Brooks. Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, Frank Bruni, Roger Cohen, and Paul Krugman, the New York Times editorial page has a good record of dipping into literature to explore the issues of the day. Yesterday, it was Charles Blow’s turn as he cited a Langston Hughes poem.
The occasion was the “man bites dog” story of a public prosecutor, Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby, bringing murder charges against six police for the death of a black man. As Blow recounts in depressing detail, this does not happen often. Instead, African Americans have ample reason to expect that American justice will always side against them, whatever the facts.
Blow observes that the long history of police going unindicted or unconvicted after killing young black men
eats away at public confidence in equal justice under the law and reaffirms people’s worst fears: that the eyes of justice aren’t blind but jaundiced.
Then he quotes Hughes:
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
Speaking of Hughes, it’s worth applying one of his best-known poems to Baltimore. After reading it, how would you assess the state of its black citizenry:
Harlem
By Langston Hughes
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?
In the multiple television interviews I witnessed where Baltimore inhabitants talked about the city’s deeply entrenched poverty and the routine instances of police violence, I saw people who were drying up in resignation, festering in hopelessness, and sagging in despair. They also told stories of people who had escaped into drugs and crime, which could be categorized as going bad like rotten meat.
And then some people exploded, burning a CVS. At which point the world began to pay attention.
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