Dreaming the Same Dream: Harlem, Haiti and Racial Solidarity

Abstract

White America in developing a self-concept based on Reason and Power found it necessary to impose mental boundaries which consigned other cultures to impotence and irrationality. This cognitive map, which became a way of ordering geo-political reality, was shaped by imaginative and ultimately political constraints which marginalized other cultures. Haiti had dearly become by the early twentieth century one of the victims of the shaping force of this discourse. Haiti had been identified as deviant and banished to the cultural periphery. The perception of Haiti in reductive, ideologically determined terms had inexorably led to political attitudes of exclusion, paternalism and occupation.

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done

Then rest at cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently,

Dark like me —

That is my dream!

Langston Hughes