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Today’s a good day. Not a perfect one but certainly a massive step in the right direction and President Trump has left the White House and Washington, D.C. and Joseph R. Biden and Kamala Devi Harris are set to be sworn in as President and Vice President of the United States of America.
White men in the office of President is nothing new but Kamala will be the first woman, of any race, to hold the office of Vice President.
And she won’t be the only one Black woman making history today.
Amanda Gorman has been tapped to read the inaugural poem at today’s proceedings. And at just 23-years-old, she becomes the youngest inaugural poet in history.
Gorman was awarded National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, the first person to win the award.
As an activist from Los Angeles, her work details issues of race, feminism, oppression, and themes from the African diaspora.
She told The New York Times, that today she plans to read, The Hills We Climb. Gorman claims the piece was finished earlier this month after domestic terrorists and white insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Gorman said, “In my poem, I’m not going to in any way gloss over what we’ve seen over the past few weeks and, dare I say, the past few years. But what I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal. It’s doing that in a way that is not erasing or neglecting the harsh truths I think America needs to reconcile with. “We have to confront these realities if we’re going to move forward, so that’s also an important touchstone of the poem. There is space for grief and horror and hope and unity, and I also hope that there is a breath for joy in the poem, because I do think we have a lot to celebrate at this inauguration.”
Facts.
While we would all love for America to “come together,” that has to be some acknowledgment of the hurt and damage that has taken place first. And we’re happy to know that a Black woman will be on this nation’s stage to deliver that message.
You can tune into live inauguration coverage in the video below. Biden is set to be sworn in sometime around noon (no specific times were given) so you can expect to tune in for the beginning of the events, including Gorman’s poem, an hour before then at 11.
After her memorable oration, Gorman tweeted that she received a very special gift from Oprah Winfrey in honor of her reciting today’s inaugural poem.
