It is a measure of the problem with racism in America that a poem written more than a century ago by an angry and frustrated Black man condemning discrimination against Black people still resonates today. More than a century after the repeal of most Jim Crow legislation, long after Brown vs. the Board of Education, and the bloody street birth of the civil rights movement, the Rodney King beating (1990), the protests in Ferguson, Missouri (2014), the street murder of George Floyd (2020), the broad-daylight hunting down of Ahmaud Arbery for being a Black man jogging through a white neighborhood (2020), and the racially-motivated mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store (2022), racism still reflects an entrenched socio-economic cultural mindset: Black people are part of America, certainly, but they are apart from it as well. How far we have come, Claude McKay’s poem reminds us in 1919, and how far we still have to go.

At the center of McKay’s argument is the chilling reality that despite the rhetoric of America as the home of the free, despite the rhetoric of all people being created equal, America unironically sustains an “us” versus “them” mentality when it comes to Black and white relations.