By: The Rainbow Times’ Editorial Team
A few minutes before noon, former VP Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and former Senator Kamala Harris were sworn in on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Biden and Harris are now the U.S.’ new President and Vice-President, respectively.
A little over two centuries after John Adams became the nation’s first vice president, Kamala Harris made history as she became the first African American woman, and the first woman of South Asian descent that has ever been sworn into such a high-profile position in the country and it was Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first female Justice of Latinx descent to serve on the Supreme Court, who administered the oath.
January 20, 2021
The roughly six minutes that belonged to Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old Black poet from Los Angeles, may become what many Americans remember most vividly about Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president on Jan. 20.
Gorman’s recitation of her work “The Hill We Climb” was a showstopper, her performance as powerful and transformative as her verses.
Gorman has explained that she finished the work late at night on Jan. 6, the day of the violent insurrection at the US Capitol. She references the darkness and trials the country has recently endured, writing of “a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy” and “nearly succeeded.” But she also delivers an ode to America’s resilience and a call to summon it. In the final line, she writes that “the light that is always there, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Alex Wong / Getty Images
20 January 2021 will go down in history as an Inauguration Day like no other, which saw new US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris sworn in without the throngs of crowds that typically look on at such an occasion. Yet the downscaled, socially-distanced celebrations felt all the more emotional considering the extraordinary circumstances in which they took place, amid the raging of a global pandemic and at a moment of strife and division within the US.
Among the celebrity performances, prayers and speeches broadcast to viewers at home, the appearance of young poet Amanda Gorman left an impression that will not easily be forgotten. For all the star power lent to proceedings by the likes of Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez, Gorman’s reading of her own work, ‘The Hill We Climb’, has been widely hailed as a moment that stole the show. So just who is the 22-year-old poet who so deftly captured the mood of a nation on that all important day?