“‘Singing Your Mean Old Backlash Blues': Blues, History, and Racial Inequality Today,”

Langston Hughes' final poem, “Backlash Blues” (1967) will be turned into a song by Nina Simone. Both artists have left us, however, U.S. contemporary politics and society make this “old blues poem” sound not dated at all: the long-waited “Post-Racial America” is slow at arising, and there are countless ways in which discrimination keeps spreading around the nation. My essay examines how “Backlash Blues” depicts a world not much different from the US society that movements like #BlackLivesMatter urge to change. Such society claims race is no longer relevant, but it does so exactly to maintain intact the racial order. Indeed, the very concept of “backlash” is useful to understand how black people's identity seems not to be allowed to exist on its own, but only as opposed to that of the “dominant group”, the white people. There used to exist in America a calculated dis-integration which aimed at oppressing a specific minority. This system still exists nowadays, preventing people from achieving true freedom and defining their identity. More than fifty years later, the call is the same made by James Baldwin: "What one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our history. [...] Until this moment, there's scarcely any hope for the 'American Dream', because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it." Blues has always been interwoven with history and its narration—and the “Backlash Blues” provides important insights to understand today’s America.