America’s Promise

H. Steven Savage

Steven is an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, having spent most of his time there at the satellite campus in the city of Wilmington. While in Wilmington he studied literature, religion, sociology, social and political philosophy, and Africana studies. His major now is Philosophy, with a minor in Religious Studies. He hopes to push the ideas he’s studying out of the classroom and into the rest of the world where they can impact more people. He firmly believes that education is a tool to challenge existing power structures, and as scholars we have an obligation to use that education to promote change, justice, and decolonization.

Abstract

This is a poem I wrote as part of my final exam for my Studies in Diversity class in Fall of 2021. The main purpose of the class was to explore a series of different perspectives on the idea of a “promised land,” and specifically how people have painted America and the American Dream as a version of the biblical promised land. The class was subtitled “Delaware Resistance” as we used the lens of opposition to injustice in Wilmington, the city where my classes were taking place. The question for the final was “what is America's promise, if there is one?” and this was my response. The goal was to capture in one piece of literature my reflections on everything I learned in the class, in other classes focused on America’s history of injustice, and everything I learned living through the pandemic and the protests following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. A big focus of the class was not just on learning the history of injustice, but the importance of taking tangible action. Particularly in a strictly academic setting, it becomes easier to abstract the problems we face in the world. We study, dissect, and try to understand what happens and why, but in so doing we can lose ourselves in the data and the analysis and forget that learning about injustice isn’t the same thing as doing something about it. If a bunch of white men get degrees in fields that tackle race, gender & sexuality, immigration reform, rooting corruption out of courts and legal systems, then they can delude themselves into thinking they’ve done the work to try and effect positive change in society. But if they don’t make good on that and put in the real work, if they get stuck in offices writing papers about critical race theory that will only be read by other professors who study critical race theory, no one outside of the world of academia benefits. That knowledge isn’t used to make the world better for people. Education means nothing if we think it is the end unto itself, and schools and universities are where the revolution begins. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was students at a university, which many of us are. What are you paying so much money for if not to use the knowledge you gain to make the world a better place to live in for as many people as you can? Do you not owe it to the world? If you aren’t working to bring other people up, are you complicit in an unjust society? This poem is meant to be part of that discussion. We have an obligation to fight for a better world, and we need to think about what that world should be. What would the promise we make to each other be? How do we overcome the us vs. them mentality? How do we accept and embrace diversity, instead of expecting everyone to fit into artificial categories? I don’t have all the answers to those questions, but it feels like we need to be thinking about that if we’re going get anywhere.

America’s Promise

it’s the evening before the end and I wonder what a promise even is

whether the context of “lands” can be construed beyond the tangible or intangible

and find some harmony in the space between the abstract and the concrete

whose promise? America’s promise? what can she promise as an abstraction?

can ideas make promises, or are they themselves the promise?

or is it a promise we make to each other?

what would it sound like?

a promise to be kind? to be considerate? to be patient, wise, humble, forgiving, understanding, helpful, giving, unsuccumbing in the face of adversity?

can we build a city on trust?

... can we build it on rock and roll?

are the people who built this country the ones who wrote the ideas down on paper? the ones who fought and died to protect her? the ones whose labor and exploitation allowed others to expand their wealth? is that the promise? we promise to exploit you for wealth?

Fitzgerald asked us if the American Dream was dead, and if a green light really means go

Kerouac asked if the Dream was freedom, the road, the ability to go where you want to go

Thompson tried to find the heart of the Dream behind an acid cloud and mescaline headache, uncovering monsters in the blurry vagaries of Las Vegas

or maybe it’s just freedom in some camper in the desert

maybe the truth is there is no promise

we fight because we have to 

because promises made between white men in a room two hundred and fifty years ago were never meant to seep beyond those walls in Philadelphia

and fighting was the only way to seize that promise

take it by the heart and scatter it to the masses

maybe Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Thompson can write about the promise because they were born into it, white men in a white man’s world

Hughes’s promise languished in the sun, like so many promises no one meant to keep

Baldwin’s promise ended up in France, far away from anyone who theoretically made it

Hurston’s promise died in a hurricane, put down and put on trial and barely acquitted by a jury that thought they knew Jack about Shit

these are the promises we make: to lie, to steal, to be uncompromising in our hypocrisy

to raise ourselves to a pedestal of grandeur, and to put a border check or a customs official at the bottom, screening newcomers to the promise and kicking the rejects down the stairs

and maybe that’s enough to keep resisting

what’s a promise? what’s an idea? who are “we”? who are “they”? where is that large automobile? how did I get here? who am I? what do I want?

all I know is we should probably stop that pedestal from getting taller, and keep people from getting hurt when they’re tossed to the bottom

maybe we”ll get enough people to knock the damn thing over