"Distributed 'Blackishness'": The Uses of Black American Poets among Candidates of the 2020 US Democratic Primaries

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• "Distributed 'Blackishness'":The Uses of Black American Poets among Candidates of the 2020 US Democratic Primaries
• Micah Bateman (bio)

After a long season in which several of Joe Biden's competitors for the Democratic nomination to the US presidency in 2020 styled their campaigns with poetry, it was largely not until the end of his successful bid against Donald Trump that Biden chose verse to be a larger part of his own. In October 2020, two weeks before his election, his staff released a YouTube video of his recitation of "The Cure at Troy," an adaptation from Sophocles by Seamus Heaney that Biden has long recited at various events, sometimes with the same opening joke about his Irish heritage and affinity. From an address to the World Affairs Council in 2007: "I'm always quoting Irish poets, and my friends in the Senate kid me. They think it's because I'm Jean Finnegan's son. I'm Irish. That's not the reason I quote them. I quote them because they're the best poets."¹ And from a plenary address to the EU-US Summit in 2021: "You think I quoted Irish poets because I'm Irish. That's not the reason. I quote them because they're the best poets in the world. That's why."² After fourteen years, Biden's identification with Irish verse—particularly Heaney's—has become a chestnut for opening remarks to international audiences. Biden's laying bear of his ethnically oriented selection bias is a charming gambit to many, but his sharing of Heaney in 2020 became a major news item for the Irish press, with RTÉ News, for instance, describing Biden as a "proud Irish-American" and ending their broadcast with his YouTube video on the night of his election.³

Lin Manuel-Miranda also recited from "The Cure at Troy" at Biden's inauguration, for which Biden's choice of an inaugural poet, Amanda Gorman, was not of Irish descent but one of now three Black women poets out of six total inaugural poets to have recited original verse at the presidential inaugurations of elected American Democrats (the other two: Maya Angelou for Bill Clinton in 1992 and then Elizabeth Alexander for Barack Obama in 2008). Juxtaposing Biden's poets—Heaney and Gorman—orients [End Page 192] a self-to-other coordinate scale by which Biden can personally and ethnically identify with Heaney while positioning the much younger and Black Gorman to stand in for the everyone else whom the Democratic tent purportedly includes. The Biden campaign video featuring his recitation actually mediates these poles, as Biden's voiceover of Heaney is overlaid onto images of struggle and protest of many people of color from, for instance, Black Lives Matter demonstrations to protests at the Trump Tower. The crucial last line from the following quatrain is imprinted on the image of a young Black boy sitting atop his father's shoulders with his fist raised:

But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme.

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View full resolution Image 1.

A still from the MoveOn video depicting a young Black child raising his fist, with words overlaid from Seamus Heaney's poem "The Cure at Troy."

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The images in the video authenticate Biden (through the verse of Heaney) as, among other things, a populist champion who will stand up for the largely non-white crowds left in the shadow of Trump Tower, a metonymic term for white, corporate interests—a self-authentication reinforced by the selection of a young, Black inaugural poet. But the Harvard-educated Gorman is far from the opposite of the white, western traditions that "The Cure at Troy" invokes. Rather, like Angelou and Alexander before her, Gorman, for white audiences, bears a respectability through institutional and literary prestige that contributes to what I'll call "Blackishness." By "Blackishness," I refer to the combination of "bookishness," as described by Jessica Pressman,⁴ and Blackness as an affiliating signal or rhetorical posture (think: Bill Clinton, described by Toni Morrison as "the first black president," playing saxophone on The Arsenio...