Langston Hughes was one of the greatest and most progressive of all US artists, almost completely erased from the literary canon today. His classic poem “Harlem” predicted, decades before the reality, that Harlem’s neocolonial immiseration was the model for what the plutocrats were going to do to the entire US middle class.
By Dionysius
This summer something is going to happen in the United States which has never happened in the 242 years of its existence as a republic. Simply, a majority of US citizens are going to reject the idea that the US ought to be an empire instead of a democracy. This may seem like a strange argument, given that the US has one of the oldest traditions of electoral democracy of any polity in the world.
Yet the problem is not that the US has lacked democratic institutions. It is that these institutions have been fatally corrupted by centuries of imperial expansionism. Between 1783 and 1860, the US was a slave empire. Between 1860 and 1898, it was a settler colonial empire. Between 1898 and 1945, it was a maritime colonial empire. Between 1945 and 2008, it was a hegemonic neocolonial empire. Between 2008 and 2025, it was a post-hegemonic neocolonial empire.
At every step of the way, an electoral majority of US citizens supported the idea that the US was an empire – until this summer. To understand why this is so, it is worth reexamining Langston Hughes’ classic poem “Harlem”. It is a remarkably compact text, consisting of fifty-two words arranged into eleven lines of text. It was written in 1950, at the very peak of the US empire – the moment when the US produced almost half of the world’s economic output, the US navy controlled the world’s oceans, and US citizens had the highest standard of living in the world.
While it is arguably Hughes’ most famous poem, it is also one of the most misunderstood. The mainstream US critics of the 1950s regarded it as African American folklore. The more appreciative critics of the 1960s classified it as an expression of the African American civil rights movement. The critics of the 1970s came closest of all, by diagnosing it as the anticipation of the 1967-1970 Black Panther uprising. The mainstream critics of subsequent decades simply ignored the poem, consigning it to the scrap heap of history.
We will argue Hughes’ poem was not describing the events of the 1950s or predicting those of the 1960s. It was a message in a bottle addressed to the US citizens who would rise up against the US empire 75 years in the future. Our first clue as to the nature of this message is the contrast between the clarity of the poem’s title and the obscurity of its first line:
Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Harlem is a region of approximately 3.63 square kilometers (1.4 square US miles) located in the northern half of the island of Manhattan, New York City.1 During the early 20th century, it became a key destination for African American migrants. According to the US Census Bureau, the African American share of the population in central Harlem rose from 10% in 1910 to 32% in 1920, 70% by 1930, and to an all-time high of 98% by 1950.
This influx transformed Harlem into the home of some of the greatest African American writers, musicians, dancers, composers and directors of the 20th century. Hughes himself lived in Harlem from 1947 until his passing in 1967, and his residence at 20 East 127th Street was later turned into the historic landmark of the Langston Hughes House.
That said, most inhabitants of Harlem were impoverished workers who had to battle against entrenched racism as well as class exclusion. New York City’s population was 89.5% white in 1950, and the electorate funneled public resources into upper middle class and white communities rather than to working-class and African American communities. One of the most famous expressions of the contradiction between Harlem’s extraordinary cultural dynamism and the desperate poverty of its residents was Claude Brown’s best-selling autobiography Manchild in the Promised Land (1965). Brown was born in Harlem in 1937 to parents who were originally sharecroppers from South Carolina, and wrote with honesty and empathy about growing up in Harlem’s youth gangs during the 1940s and 1950s.2
Yet if the title of Hughes’ poem is wholly transparent, the first line is anything but. The single most common misreading of this line is the assumption that it refers to the American dream. Hughes was a scathing critic of the US empire, and excoriated US imperial exceptionalism in his classic 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again”.3
In fact, the true purpose of the phrase “What happens” is to dislocate our sense of time and place. We do not know who is dreaming, what the dream consists of, or when it is being dreamed.
The mystery of the opening line deepens when we consider the use of the verb “deferred”. This verb and its associated nouns (“deferral”, “deferment”) are primarily used in financial and legal contexts, e.g. borrowers defer loan repayments. The verb literally enacts what it symbolizes by blocking any easy resolution of the question “What happens” and inverting the standard English usage of putting adjectives in front of nouns (i.e. one speaks of a “successful dream” or a “failed dream”).
Most subversive of all, the first line utilizes phonemes – the sounds made by specific words – to disrupt our sense of space. The bedrock phoneme of the poem is the “uh” sound of “What” (pronounced like the “u” in “mutt”), which appears eleven times in the text. This is a relaxed sound which forms the polar opposite of the energetic “ee” sound in “dream”. This “ee” is repeated by the first vowel of “deferred”, while the second vowel, pronounced “erd”, is equidistant between the two phonemes of “Harlem” (i.e. the “ar” is pronounced with an arched tongue and open lips, the “em” is pronounced with a relaxed tongue and closed lips, while “erd” is pronounced with half-closed lips and a slightly arched tongue against the palate).
The effect of this phonemic shift is to pull the rug from underneath our initial understanding of the poem’s title, i.e. the assumption that the dream in question is about Harlem or dreamed by Harlemites. The word “Harlem” – the single most racialized word in the English language in 1950 – implodes into an abyss of nothingness, in much the same way the kinetic energy of individual lines of paint implode into the earth-tone backgrounds of Jackson Pollock’s greatest paintings.4
The sense of dislocation deepens still further in the second and third lines:
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
The term “raisin in the sun” has become an iconic symbol of African American cultural resistance thanks to Lorraine Hansberry’s play Raisin in the Sun (1959), a melodrama focusing on the struggle of an African American family to move from an urban tenement into a white majority suburb of Chicago.5 However, the original inspiration for the line most likely came from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which depicted the struggle of Depression-era California grape farmers for a living wage.
What makes these two lines so uncanny for the audiences of the 21st century is the fact that the dream in question remains undefined. We do not know what it is, who has dreamed it, or the time frame of its realization. We do know that it is locked in some sort of legalistic or juridical limbo. We also know that it is not imperishable.
This vulnerability is subtly emphasized by a shift in phonemes. Whereas the first line set the relaxed “uh” phoneme of “What” in motion towards the tension-filled “ee” of “deferred”, the second and third lines contrast the “uh” of “Does” with the rounded “ay” in the first syllable of “raisin”. In fact, the “uh” sound is cited five times in the course of ten words (“Does”, “up”, “a”, “the”, “sun”).
This repetition is crucial to understand the radical break of the fourth and fifth lines, which disrupt the culinary metaphor of sweetness with the nauseating spectacle of bodily decay:
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
While the “er” of “deferred”, which fused the “ar” and “em” of “Harlem”, is repeated in the second syllable of “fester”, the fourth line is bracketed by two uses of the “or” sound (“Or” and “sore”). The “uh” phoneme returns one more time in the concluding verb “run”, evoking pus suppurating from a wound.
The theme of sweetness gone bad is reinforced by the sixth, seventh and eighth lines, which add the additional elements of repulsive smells and the ugliness of scabs which form over wounds:
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?
Given that this poem was written in 1950, the reference to rotting meat is an oblique nod to the wartime trauma experienced by the numerous US veterans of World War 2, who constituted one seventh of the US adult population.6 This geopolitical reading is supported by the phonemic polarization of these three lines between the “uh” sound which recurs with metronomic regularity three times over (“Does” in the sixth line, “crust” in the seventh and the “u” in “syrupy” in the eighth), and the “ee” sound which appears two times in “stink” and “meat”, and then as the explosive staccato which concludes the eighth line (“syrupy sweet”).
The use of the word “syrupy” is especially brilliant and rich in phonemic associations. The first vowel, “syr”, is pronounced like “sir”, an honorific commonly used in the US military by subordinates when conversing with officers of higher rank. The second and third vowels (“uh” and “ee”) set the basic phonemic tension of the poem into direct contact with each other, transforming the final word “sweet” into an ironic epithet.
The combination of wartime memories and phonemic interplay is what tinges the eighth line with wholesale horror. The pleasure of sweetness on the tongue turns into its opposite, revulsion at the spectacle of a dream which has been cruelly replaced by a saccharine simulacrum of the original.7
Yet instead of dwelling on this horror, Hughes points us towards the possibility of collective resistance. The ninth and tenth lines refer to the laboring bodies charged with transporting goods – movers, truckers, teamsters and haulers. It is no accident that these two lines are separated from the rest of the poem by line breaks, suggesting the isolation of a single truck driver out on a delivery, a single worker transporting a pallet of goods in a warehouse, or a single service worker at a cash register. The lines also generate a maximum of aesthetic affect from a minimum of linguistic means, by using just five syllables per line:
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Nor is it an accident that the appearance of labor coincides with the first use of the punctuation mark of the period in the poem. This period emphasizes the ponderousness and weight of the load in question, while framing a tentative response to the five successive questions which comprise the previous lines of the poem, i.e. the dream persists under inclement conditions.
The play of phonemes in these lines is the most complex in the entire poem. The “ay” glimpsed once in “raisin” (line 3) returns as the first vowel of “Maybe”, the “uh” returns twice in “just” and “a”, the “ee” also returns twice as the second vowel of “Maybe” and the second vowel of “heavy”, while the “ah” of “sags” reiterates the “ah” of “happens” (line 1). Most subtly of all, the “oh” in “load” echoes the first vowel of “over” (line 7).
Everything is now in place for the eleventh and final line, a trigger set to detonate 75 years in the future. The five themes cited by the first ten lines – the dissolution of any fixed sense of space or time, the uncertainty over what the dream is, the lack of a subject who could be described as the dreamer, the transformation of overtly positive attributes into covertly negative ones, the weight of commodities on laboring bodies – culminate with concussive force:
Or does it explode?
The final “Or” references the “sore” of line 4, the “does” reiterates the recurrent “uh” sound one last time, while the phonemic element of the “ee” sound simply vanishes. It is replaced by the open-mouthed “oh” – the primary sound of astonishment and surprise for English speakers – in “explode”.
There are two common misreadings of this final line which need to be forestalled here. The first is the notion that this explosion is an act of personal aggression or violence. There is no textual evidence to support this reading. The deferral of the dream is repeatedly described in elliptical and non-violent terms, i.e. as something which dries up, runs like a sore, crusts over, or sags.
The second misreading is the notion that Hughes is referring to the actual riot which took place in Harlem during August 1 – August 2, 1943. This riot was triggered by the nonfatal shooting of an African American soldier by a white police officer, and was quelled only after several million dollars of property damage, five deaths, four hundred injuries and six hundred arrests.
It is worth pointing out that the closing line makes no reference to any actual explosion or historical event, but focuses exclusively on the dream itself – or to be more precisely, on the elusive, quicksilver “it” mentioned in lines 2, 6 and 9. In fact, the closing line provides three clues that this explosion is not an act of violence, but the marker of something else we still need to identify.
First, the line concludes with a destabilizing question mark rather than an affirmative exclamation point, a definitive em dash, or a declarative period. This suggests the explosion could have just happened – or that it is still waiting to happen. Secondly, the line is italicized. While italics normally denote heightened emotional intensity, their use here suggests the presence of a psychological voice or an interior monologue.
The third and final clue is that the line is separated from the rest of the poem by a line break, thereby dividing the poem into four distinct sections. The first of these sections raised the question of deferral, the second listed the ways this deferral manifested itself, while the third evoked the presence of laboring bodies.
Crucially, the fourth section repeats the five-syllable format of the third section (Hughes’ addition of “Or” at the beginning of the line to ensure it had the requisite five syllables is a lyrical stroke of genius). What is not clear, on the other hand, is the precise nature of the connection between those laboring bodies and the concluding explosion.
To solve the mystery of this four-part structure, we must carefully reread the poem one more time. This second reading reveals a nuance easy to miss during the first reading: the opening line begins at the far left margin of the page without indentation, whereas the ten subsequent lines are all indented.8 That is, the five questions and one statement contained in the indented lines depict six potential outcomes of the state of deferral outlined by the opening line. These outcomes are withering, infection, olfactory decay, encystment, torpor and finally an explosion.
This list is interesting for two reasons. First, all six are negative conditions and are depicted without any trace of positivity or redemption. In fact, the poem’s dry concision is the tonal opposite of the rousing, florid calls for progressive political transformation typical of Hughes’ earlier poems.9
Second, these six negative outcomes are not tied to a specific time or identifiable place. They are overlapping and concurrent possibilities which destabilize the notion of any quick or easy resolution to the problem of dream-deferral.
Here in 2025, seven and a half decades after the poem’s publication, we can finally decode the message Hughes was transmitting to the pro-democracy movement of our own time. The mystery can be solved by a simple query: who is asking the question of line 1, the most crucial of the poem? Put bluntly, who had the intellectual education, the artistic training, and the linguistic precision to investigate the social conditions which frustrate, derail and suborn personal dreams?
The answer is surely not the vast majority of Harlem’s African American residents, who were fully absorbed in the struggle for daily survival. The answer is also not the vast majority of the 120 million adult US citizens of 1950, who spent their time acquiring houses, automobiles and television sets.
There were only two groups of people with the training, time and temperament to ask that question. The first was the extremely small circle of the progressive artists of Hughes’ era. The second was the even smaller circle of people who had created Harlem in the first place. These latter were the plutocratic elites who were the primary beneficiaries of a racially segregated, economically polarized and neocolonial US empire.
These plutocratic elites had paid off both US political parties to allow ethnic ghettos like Harlem to exist, since they were a wondrously efficient means of scapegoating, terrorizing and ghettoize indigenous Americans, African Americans, poor white Americans and immigrants. These plutocrats also financed the record and music producers who exploited Harlem’s blues and jazz artists in order to sell records to white audiences. Every significant US movement of political revanchism in post-1945 US history, from McCarthyism to Trumpism, has been financed by these plutocrats.
What Hughes’ poem predicted, decades before the reality, was that Harlem’s neocolonial immiseration was the model for what the plutocrats were going to do to the entire US middle class. That middle class had been originally established by Roosevelt’s New Deal, and then expanded by the progressive mobilizations of World War 2 to include the demographic majority of US citizens. Since 1973, however, the plutocrats have been systematically destroying this middle class. In terms of raw numbers, the US middle class shrank from two-thirds of the total US population in 1980 to only 50% by 2000, to 33% by 2010, and to 25% here in 2025.
What happens next is the epoch of mass pro-democratic protests in the US, powered by the 75% of US citizens who are no longer in the middle class and who longer believe in the empty promises of an extinct empire. What exact form this movement will take nobody can know, but it will come – and it is going to the political landscape of the United States forever.
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Notes:
1 The official designation of Central Harlem is Manhattan Community District 10.
2 The African American share would decline from 95% in 1970 to 88% in 1990, 78% in 2000, and 51% by 2023. This is US Census data compiled by the Gotham Gazette and Data USA.
3 “I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,/ I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. / I am the red man driven from the land, / I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek – / And finding only the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” Langston Hughes. “Let America be America Again.” 1936.
4 Jackson Pollock’s greatest works included Number 1, 1948 (1948), Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (1950), Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 (1950) and One: Number 31, 1950 (1950).
5 Hansberry openly acknowledged Hughes’ poem as the inspiration for her title. The play was later adapted into an excellent 1961 film directed by Daniel Petrie, and starring Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, Roy Glenn, Sidney Poitier and Diana Sands. The film can be viewed here.
6 A total of 16 million US citizens were mobilized during the war, 14% of the total adult population, and 1.076 million of the mobilized became casualties.
7 Put bluntly, Hughes condensed the basic Frankfurt School critique of the capitalist culture-industry – i..e that Disney colonized minds where US plutocrats colonized polities – into three lines.
8 This indentation can be viewed online here.
9 This commitment is on explicit display in the conclusion of Hughes’ afore-mentioned Let America be America Again: “The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, / We, the people, must redeem / The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. / The mountains and the endless plain — / All, all the stretch of these great green states— / And make America again!”
(The author is a social activist in U.S.)