Poems About Racism

This past Tuesday when Barack Obama stepped out of the political morass and wiped the mud from his suit, when every one of the chattering news networks quieted down to watch him speak, I cringed, convinced the gifted orator couldn't be that gifted. He was doing himself in. Yet there he was addressing racism, of all things, with wisdom and grace and care and forgiveness. Accepting that it was, in part, a calculated move by a campaign, and no matter its effect (or lack thereof) on the election, it was the most remarkable speech I've witnessed in my lifetime.

There were the pundits unsure how to handle what so clearly had transcended politics. There was CNN, plucking the most inflammatory line in the speech: Obama: "Racism is a Stain on the Constitution" for their headline--then realizing they were an embarrassing demonstration of Obama's criticism of the press, pulling it. It was a surreal and, in some ways, joyous moment.

Of course, as soon as Obama began walking off the stage, the smear engines of the right wing and the Clinton campaign were warming up again. Their agents were looking for attacks (how dare he insult his grandmother like that!). This is politics after all. But before we lose ourselves in that world again, I want to offer some of what poetry has added to the conversation on race. And I encourage you to add poems to my list.

Like Obama, Langston Hughes was raised by his mother and his grandmother--his father having abandoned them. He became one of the great American poets. His influences--including Carl Sandburg and Paul Laurence Dunbar--were both black and white. His bold and ambitious poem about the African American experience I, Too, Sing America, echoes Walt Whitman more than anyone else.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

It stuns me to think that this was written--that Hughes faced these issues--just over fifty years ago. Michael S. Harper, currently a professor at Brown university, reminds us in his poem American History how bad it was at the nation's birth and how bad it still can be.

Those four black girls blown up

in that Alabama church

remind me of five hundred

middle passage blacks,

in a net, under water

in Charleston harbor

so redcoats wouldn't find them.

Can't find what you can't see

can you?

Harlem Renaissance poet Claude MckKay's The White House lays out more of the difficulties faced by African-Americans and speaks to the resentment that might build in a community. There is dignity and power in the poem's rigid form.

Your door is shut against my tightened face,

And I am sharp as steel with discontent;

But I possess the courage and the grace

To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,

A chafing savage, down the decent street;

And passion rends my vitals as I pass,

Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.

Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,

Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,

And find in it the superhuman power

To hold me to the letter of your law!

Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate

Against the potent poison of your hate.

In his great poem For the Union Dead, Robert Lowell ruminates on Boston's monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (who was white) and his 54th Massachusetts Regiment of African American soldiers (you might know them as the subject of the movie Glory).

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead...

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

grow slimmer and younger each year--

wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets

and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument

except the ditch,

where his son's body was thrown

and lost with his "niggers."

Lowell wrote that the monument "sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat." It was a wonder to hear that throat cleared on Tuesday.

Comments

[OhioPoBoy]

HuffPost's Pick

Poetry helps people see beyond their selves to what we all hold in common. I was drawn to Obama's speech because it was both high minded and plainly spoken. It reached out to both sides of the divide he, as a man both black and white, stands astride. My cousin is white and married to a black police officer. Their children get racist remarks from both sides. This issue is more complex than just white people hating. Poor whites attend the same schools and soup kitchens as poor blacks. Wealthy middle class black folk are just as dismissive of both races when approached by the homeless on the street. We need to bring America back to when people saw what we all had in common. We need to reach across the divide and down to all races that have no hope. We have seen what the myth-masters like Rove have spun out that says people are rich because of God's will. One of the reasons I have hope for Obama's candidacy is that all folks, black, brown and white are feeling the pinch. There should be a level that no one in this country should slip below. The billionaires are growing more powerful and the poor need us to say, "You have had your Republican feast, it is time for a little evening up." No matter what race, no one should be made to feel they are not worth saving.

[JerseyBob]

Thousands of blacks have been lynched in the United States. Two young black men, Thomas Ship and Abram Smith, were lynched in 1930. They were the inspiration for a poem, "Strange Fruit," written by a Jewish teacher, Abel Meeropol, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Allan. The poem became the lyrics for a song sang by Billie Holiday, a black singer. She first sang it in public in 1939. It is the most affecting verse I have ever heard sung.

STRANGE FRUIT
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood on the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

This should be heard. It is haunting. Many who are reading this may not have heard it. You can see and hear Billie Holiday sing "Strange Fruit" on YouTube.

[JerseyBob]

(apparently the first post did not go off well so I needed to tt again. Tks.)

[JerseyBob]

Thousands of blacks have been lynched in the United States. Two young black men, Thomas ship and Abram Smith, were lynched in 1930. They were the inspiration for a poem, "Strange Fruit," written by a Jewish teacher, Abel Meeropol, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Allan. The poem became the lyrics for a song sang by Billie Holiday, a black singer. She first sang it in public in 1939. It is the most affecting verse I have ever heard sung.

[Meggars]

I appreciate you making this effort. As a poet, I know the art has been essential to meaningful social change in every instance.

[JustMe1962]

One that I read as a child:

[Ishmael1]

I watched Barack's luminous speech on racism and have read the poems here. I would offer a different perspective on race from the other long-oppressed people of this country, Native people.

Here is Santee Sioux poet and AIM activist John Trudell's "Look At Us".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vya5aFki_xk

Look at us, we are of earth and water.
Look at them, it is the same.
Look at us, we are suffering all these years.
Look at them, they are connected.
Look at us, we are in pain.
Look at them, surprised at our anger.
Look at us, we are struggling to survive.
Look at them, expecting sorrow be benign.
Look at us, we are the ones called pagan.
Look at them, on their arrival.
Look at us, we are called subversive.
Look at them, descended from name-callers.
Look at us, we wept sadly in the long dark.
Look at them, hiding in techo-logic light.
Look at us, we buried the generations.
Look at them, inventing the body count.
Look at us, we are older than America.
Look at them, chasing a fountain of youth.
Look at us, we are embracing Earth.
Look at them, clutching today.
Look at us, we are living in the generations.
Look at them, existing in jobs and debt.
Look at us, we have escaped many times.
Look at them, they cannot remember.
Look at us, we are healing.
Look at them, their medicine is patented.
Look at us, we are trying.
Look at them, what are they doing.
Look at us, we are children of Earth.
Look at them, who are they?

[adl]

Initially, white and black people in this country were used as indentured servants. They would work for free for a time but then they would be able to rise above that station in life. Building a country, as you can imagine, required a lot of labor, so eventually, the black laborers became slaves for life and the slave trade began from Africa. I imagine this switch was due to racism at the time. Afterall, a white indentured servant could blend in to the rest of the white population and it would be difficult to differentiate him/her from anyone else. Over time, the slaves became mostly black because they were easily differentiated and thus controlled. They would see a white guy walking down the street, they had no way of knowing whether he was an indentured servant or not. A black guy walking down the street was presumed to be a slave unless he could prove otherwise with papers that free blacks were required to carry at all times.

There were certainly white people who felt uncomfortable with slavery and the fact that the African slaves were human beings. But the lure of money and needing a vast amount of labor to heal a nation was too much to override. So, to remedy this discomfort, propaganda campaigns began to diminish the humanness of the slaves. Actual advertisments and the media were used to spread the belief that blacks were less than human, had tails like monkeys and the like. Minds can be easy to manipulate in the right climate and that's what they did. It's impossible not to be disturbed by enslaving a human being. But, if you no longer see the slaves as human beings but rather as property like you would a cow or a horse, then it's no problem. There were even "scientists" who did studies to try to prove that the African was genetically inferior to the white man to further promote the African as non-human idea.

Unfortunately, these attitudes get passed down from generation to generation. There are still white people who believe some of this stuff. There are also many black people who do not trust white people because of all this (remember Jim Crow and the civil rights movement were only about 40 some years ago).

I actually find it interesting that so many white people do not know about this stuff. I guess when you grow up black in this country, your parents and your community teach it to you. This is why it's so important for us as a nation to be talking about it. I can say for me, just knowing that for some people it's not racism but just ignorance of the history that causes their attitudes is very comforting. Our education system really needs to teach this stuff, because, afterall, it's all American history.

And, I agree with standforpeace, that the problem is really one of class. The legacy of slavery and the discrimination that followed has made it so that a disproportionate number of those in the poorer classes are black. And, it does cause the population of the white poor to become invisible and the anger and frustration of being invisible is understandable.

[spinazi]

Indentured servitude was essentially enslavement for a term of service and many petty crimes in England were punished by periods of seven to fourteen years, however there were also "crimes" that resulted in servitude for life and as such cannot be distinguished from slavery. Black people were never used as indentured servants, they were bought and sold in slave markets, while whites were often kidnapped as children, transported to the colonies as a substitute for imprisonment in England, orphaned and vulnerable, and sometimes sold into a term of service by a desperate parent.

Black slavery in the US came much later and was far less extensive than that practiced by the Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America and Muslims of the Middle East. The British enslaved Blacks to work the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, which led to their use in the plantation system of the US South. Blacks, with their sickle cell trait, had greater resistance to malaria and were able to survive better in malaria climates. The majority of slave traders were Jews, so many in fact, that in Brazil the slave markets were suspended on Jewish holidays.

Africans did not leave Africa on their own and would not have been found elsewhere in the world unless they had been taken their by others. They were not in the US to work off an indenturement, but were recognized as property. There were slaves who were given their freedom long before the Emancipation Proclamation and the colony of Liberia was set up for freed slaves to repatriate in the early nineteenth century. There were even some blacks who owned and traded slaves themselves.

Africans, who had never developed the means of ocean travel, had been transported away from their racial kinsmen, their culture, and the environment to which they had adapted over hundreds of thousands of years, to live among people of a different race, alien culture, and a foreign environment. These elemental differences between Northern Europeans and Africans cannot be erased - evolutionary processes are slow - very slow, and the problems Africans have living in a foreign environment cannot be blamed on white "racism".

[Blutus]

Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
by Etheridge Knight


Hard Rock / was / "known not to take no shit
From nobody," and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.

The WORD / was / that Hard Rock wasn't a mean nigger
Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head,
Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity
Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back,
Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose,
Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status.
And we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep,
To see if the WORD was true.

As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak
Of his exploits: "Man, the last time, it took eight
Screws to put him in the Hole." "Yeah, remember when he
Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?" "He set
The record for time in the Hole--67 straight days!"
"Ol Hard Rock! man, that's one crazy nigger."
And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit
A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.

The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame.
A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch
And didn't lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
From before shook him down and barked in his face.
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly,
His eyes empty like knot holes in a fence.

And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name,
We told ourselves that he had just wised up,
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long,
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed.
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do,
The fears of years, like a biting whip,
Had cut deep bloody grooves
Across our backs.

[KelvinCelsius]

collide

i sure as f#$k never owned a slave.
i never denied a f#%$ing thing to
anyone because of the color of their skin.
what the f#$k did i do?
what did i ever do to them?
exactly.
i imagine, if we were ignorant to a universal
law. a law that ensured they could never
raise families like us. right histories like us.
make theories like us. blaze glory like us.
if that law was, and by definition we could
never know it, then what?
then i would help. i would try.
i would reach. i would strive.
i would care and i would love.
i would work until
my f#%$ing eyes and hands melted
like candle wax in a solar f$#%ing
wind of gamma rays and gods rage.
i would look the creator, the universe
in the eye, and burn in the side
and plead for love and hate to
once and for all coincide, to collide.
to determine a winner, i would die.
i will.

[Chumleysmom]

Someone please tell me about the Hughes' poem American History: .
" Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so redcoats wouldn't find them."
Can't find what you can't see
can you? "

Is it an allegory or based on fact?

[noasalira]

It is based on fact, unfortunately.

I find it so sad, and infuriating, that such history has been so effectively erased that people living today really underestimate the cruelty, brutality, degradation of the slave system, that when this history is brought up people either genuinely assume the truth is only a gross exaggeration, or they cynically depend upon national ignorance to re-write history and diminish/disregard the impact on African-Americans.

We are blessed as a people to have had people such as Langston Hughes, as well as the many elders in our own families, to teach us the truth even though most in society callously refuse to know the truth. Our challenge is to act upon what we know -- and many are doing so by voting for OBAMA 08.

[adl]

Here's a link about the Birmingham church bombing: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmjustice3.html

[adl]

It's fact. Here's a link.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmjustice3.html

[peachfuzz]

I don't have a poem, but 2 book recommendations:

Lies Across America & Lies My Teacher Told Me

by James W. Loewen, imo should be required reading

by every American. He has another, Sundown Towns,

but I have not read that one yet.

[Arawak]

I agree. Lies My Teacher Told Me should most definitely be required reading. If people had a better undestanding of our nation's history my guess is we'd be better off. I will read the others.

[ann1]

Thank you John for an open mind. A very honest and heartfelt piece.

[spinazi]

All domestic help eats in the kitchen in the house of their employer. It doesn't matter if you are black, white, Hispanic - it is a matter of class, not race. To ignore class while emphasizing race is to ignore the millions upon millions of white people who have suffered poverty, deprivation, humiliation, starvation, and slavery.
Obama in his book, "Dreams of my Father", expresses discomfort at the vision of his paternal grandfather working as a domestic for wealthy whites in Kenya. He seems not to realize that most working people work for the wealthy.

[Seattlelite]

Spinazi - you are correct all domestic's eat in the kicthen, and today those domestics are of all races but there was a time in this country those domestics were predominantly African American's. We've come along way from those days which is the point Sen.Obama was making in his speech, we don't forget the pass but we need to move beyond it, because the problems in our society today affect all people. I hope people to will understand a comment in his speech which I so can relate to which was, our pass sins in this country are generational. I can relate because a few elders in my family who lived during Jim Crow and before moving north picked cotton for a living still talk about it on occasion. They are not racists by any means but I suspect if the average white person would listen to them they might have a different opinion. The younger generation in my family are not carrying around that baggage but out of respect we just listen and realize they came from another time.

[spinazi]

But the past has not passed - not if you look at it from a class perspective rather than thinking of it in terms of black and white.

The problem with Obama's viewpoint is that he forgets the millions of ordinary, white working people who have endured terrible, debilitating hardships in the mines, factories, and hard-scrabble farms of the US. He gave the speech in Pennsylvania but made no mention of the thousands of little white boys who spent their childhoods working underground in Pennsylvania and West Virginia rather than playing or going to school. In my own family history, one widow, whose family had been in Rhode Island since the seventeenth century, was forced to sell her three oldest children into servitude in order to feed and clothe the four younger ones. Many of my ancestors fled poverty in a Europe that exploited its white citizens in diabolical ways in factories, on ships, and in the homes of the rich, only to find that they and their children were exploited in the same ways in the new country.

The reason Obama did not mention class division is because he represents the same ruling class that is a direct descendant of the past ruling class. It serves their purposes to have white people defensive about slavery and racism and black people accusatory. In such a situation no one is looking at the elites - everyone is all goo-goo eyed over Obama - a kid who never lived in poverty, never suffered from discrimination, and sees the world through the lens of an expensive Hawaiian prep school.

[standforpeace]

Part of the reason that it is so easy to ignore class in this country is because of racism. It was easy to "reform" welfare by cutting off this vital assistance to poor, single mothers and their children because the term welfare conjured up an image of the Black welfare queen who didn't deserve a handout. It is easy to ignore America's failing public schools because they call to mind holding pens for Black kids who don't appreciate education anyway. I could go on and on. The truth is that the stereotypes we have about who is poor and and working class in this country serve to make struggling whites invisible. So poor white women and Appalachian school districts are denied suffer the same lack of resources as their Black counterparts. At the same time, working class and poor whites have been fed a bill of goods they lead them to believe and behave as if their interests are more tied to those of upper class whites than to people of color in their own economic class. Unfortunately, until we get serious about confronting racism, we're not likely to do anything about class issues either. And poor and working class whites will continue to be collateral damage in the assault on Blacks.

[adl]

Initially, white and black people in this country were used as indentured servants. They would work for free for a time but then they would be able to rise above that station in life. Building a country, as you can imagine, required a lot of labor, so eventually, the black laborers became slaves for life and the slave trade began from Africa. I imagine this switch was due to racism at the time. Afterall, a white indentured servant could blend in to the rest of the white population and it would be difficult to differentiate him/her from anyone else. Over time, the slaves became mostly black because they were easily differentiated and thus controlled. They would see a white guy walking down the street, they had no way of knowing whether he was an indentured servant or not. A black guy walking down the street was presumed to be a slave unless he could prove otherwise with papers that free blacks were required to carry at all times.

There were certainly white people who felt uncomfortable with slavery and the fact that the African slaves were human beings. But the lure of money and needing a vast amount of labor to heal a nation was too much to override. So, to remedy this discomfort, propaganda campaigns began to diminish the humanness of the slaves. Actual advertisments and the media were used to spread the belief that blacks were less than human, had tails like monkeys and the like. Minds can be easy to manipulate in the right climate and that's what they did. It's impossible not to be disturbed by enslaving a human being. But, if you no longer see the slaves as human beings but rather as property like you would a cow or a horse, then it's no problem. There were even "scientists" who did studies to try to prove that the African was genetically inferior to the white man to further promote the African as non-human idea.

Unfortunately, these attitudes get passed down from generation to generation. There are still white people who believe some of this stuff. There are also many black people who do not trust white people because of all this (remember Jim Crow and the civil rights movement were only about 40 some years ago).

I actually find it interesting that so many white people do not know about this stuff. I guess when you grow up black in this country, your parents and your community teach it to you. This is why it's so important for us as a nation to be talking about it. I can say for me, just knowing that for some people it's not racism but just ignorance of the history that causes their attitudes is very comforting. Our education system really needs to teach this stuff, because, afterall, it's all American history.

And, I agree with standforpeace, that the problem is really one of class. The legacy of slavery and the discrimination that followed has made it so that a disproportionate number of those in the poorer classes are black. And, it does cause the population of the white poor to become invisible and the anger and frustration of being invisible is understandable.

[adl]

Sorry about the double postings. For some reason I've been having a hard time getting my posts to show up.

[JanetF]

Thank you so much for a positive post today - a welcome oasis