My teachers say I have privilege
Because my skin is white
Does this privilege protect my family from
the bullets that fly at night?

They say I’ve
Unearned advantages
not given to other races,
If there’s a Black kid somewhere who wants my life
I’d gladly trade them places

They can have the ****** homeless guy
Sleeping by the door
They’re free to take the rancid trash
that litters
Our hallway floor
They can have the drugs and needles
the diarrhea on the stairs
They can have the hopelessness and misery
that I see everywhere

My mom works at two jobs
In the day and late at night
My dad’s upstate in prison
Locked up since I was five
Our apartment’s filled with roaches
and mice that sneak around;
the rats that move inside the walls
make a scratching sound

I wash our clothes in the bathtub
Cause the laundry’s not too safe
Our neighbor was robbed by **** heads,
they slashed him in the face

The mold around the windows
makes my sister sick
Every day I hear her wheezing
struggling for each breath
I worry how Mom would handle
another child’s death

Some days there’s food for us to eat
Some days there is not
The school food wasn’t perfect,
but at least the stuff was hot
Now the small bus brings us sandwiches,
string cheese and a piece of fruit
I wish they delivered on weekends,
We get hungry on those days too

If this is the privilege my whiteness earns
You can have it back
I don’t think squalor plays favorites
White, Hispanic, or Black…