#whiteprivilege
Maybe you’re right, maybe it isn’t.
Maybe it isn’t a crime you committed,
But watching you silently reap the benefits of privilege
Is damaging your witness
And I wonder if you’ve considered it
Aug 23, 2020
Aug 23, 2020 at 7:48 AM UTC
Never question where I stand
I will always be there if you need a hand
I will never judge you by the color of your skin
But rather by what’s within
Look at me when you need support
For I will continue to reinforce
The BLACK LIVES MATTER
Even when we are not all gathered
Jul 5, 2020
Jul 5, 2020 at 5:00 PM UTC
Her pale skin knew all the secrets.
When the maze would twist,
and when it would turn,
when it etched a clear path,
and whispered the escape route.
His dark skin was trapped.
The maze unleashed its branches,
tightening the grip around his body,
tangling him up in the mess
that she had created.
It was designed
by her ancestors,
for only one to win.
This maze
is the one they call life.
She needed to forge a new path.
One where he leads, she follows.
One where the branches
only burden the deserved,
and not for the colour of their skin.
Jun 6, 2020
Jun 6, 2020 at 10:01 PM UTC
I was born
With white privilege;
Irish ethnicity at that.
Remember their holocausts!
Occupied, evicted, brutalized, lynched, starved, hedge-scbooled, and,
Refugeed on their own land,
And on and on, and so on
For seven hundred years.
These things were before my time,
But not my Granda's.
It's so very true, I was born with white privilege,
But not with white entitlement.
Jun 5, 2020
Jun 5, 2020 at 3:15 PM UTC
But the view's fine from here,
they say, all carbon copy cloying concern.
They don't know that the sun doesn't rise
and set quite so exquisitely
when your sky
is on fire.
But the view's from fine here,
they maintain, as unsaid words skulk in the throat.
They don't notice the skin that burns and crackles
and stretches at a breaking point
that's been broken
for years.
But the view's fine from here,
they confirm. And then turn away.
They don't see what shouldn't be seen,
what eyes can't afford to shut
even as glass splinters
edge closer.
And they are right, really,
because their view truly is fine from here.
#BlackLivesMatter i
Jun 3, 2020
Jun 3, 2020 at 4:50 AM UTC
You shake your head
as if the truth will fall right out of your ears the same way it entered
because you don't want to believe it.
You're so caught up in your own 'opinion' that you can't even open your mind up to the possibility you might be wrong.
You are given facts, statistics, news stories, yet you are unable to listen to reason.
While the straight white male ahead of me shakes his head at the possibility of being privileged,
A mother mourns over the loss of her son, a black man shot by a cop for no reason other than fear of his skin color,
another woman is silenced by her ****** through sharp threats in a dark closet,
my own mind flips back to when my aunt was disowned by most of her family for loving a woman.
Yet you, who can drive past a cop on the highway without breaking a sweat,
can walk down the street at night alone without breaking a sweat,
can show your parents your lover without breaking a sweat,
think that you aren't any more lucky than the other people I listed prior.
Oh, if you only knew how to open your mind, just slightly, instead of shake the truth out.
Lying to yourself only makes it worse when you realize the truth.
Oct 23, 2018
Oct 23, 2018 at 7:11 PM UTC
It’s not a surprise.
It’s terrible but
it’s not a surprise.
Shooting, screaming, scattering, shattering,
it’s not a surprise.
I imagine but don’t understand.
White person mental illness,
illness…
Illness,
it’s called.
He was a poor, lonely, old man whose dog just died,
so he decided
to shoot up a crowd,
and **** and hurt hundreds of people.
Because of his illness.
But just listen.
Listen.
Listen:
you’re calling him ill but he’s really just mad.
There is no kindness in him if he can go **** all those people
and not even blink.
He may have offered you a handkerchief
when you were crying,
but then he goes off and kills,
and kills,
and kills,
and the kindness in him is warped, destroyed -
lost
the second he decides to
shoot,
shoot,
shoot.
Terrorists we fear -
walking down the street with a burqa draped over.
Terrorists we fear -
flying as second class citizens because of our terror.
Terrorists we fear -
speaking in a language we don’t understand.
They’re not the terrorists we should fear.
If the white terrorist is ill, then the US is plagued.
One
after another,
after another
**** us, and we still do nothing.
Nothing.
NOTHING.
We go around the world “fixing” and “helping”,
ruining lives and terrorizing,
because that’s what we are: terrorists.
Terrorists.
Terrorists.
We want to fix the world? We can’t even help ourselves.
We the people are broken.
Who’s gonna fix us?
Dec 21, 2017
Dec 21, 2017 at 6:40 AM UTC
They stand tall and smile beautifully,
any gaps between their teeth is held together by
glue called fear of what could happen if they are
anything but perfect. This glue, it is strong and sticky
and unbelievable expensive, it costs both your pride
and your happiness
[but it's okay, because both would've been taken
anyway. This is America you are a girl and you are a
shade of black so dark it blends within the moonlight.
the skinny twig girl in your class will call you a slave and
you will bite back the salty and sour response threatening
to spill from the back of your throat, that she is the color
of cafe con leche left on the porch and dried too long from
the burning sun of the Caribbean sky; and when she and her
white-washed friends laugh you bitterly think, wow there's no
difference between her and every other ****** here.]
They are gorgeous. Lips so red they remind you of blood at
a nurse's office. Stomachs so toned you want to scream that
your color is not a trend, that your milky white and yet charcoal
black skin with small bumps easily mistaken for traffic signs
with how easily their colors change is not a beauty status. your
skin is not pretty. It speaks an oppressed language with eons
of history behind it like your great grandmother's blood that was
shed onto the white man's land after he conquered something so
precious it could never be given back and you carry that with you,
within the stitches of glass cuts you forcefully made onto your
black skin, sickeningly thinking that you weren't good
enough because you aren't them and inside the skeleton
of your body is your grandmother
and she was a warrior in her own right and you carry her within you
and inside it not something middle school girls can laugh at.
it not something bitter old white politicians can mockingly ridicule
and sarcastically apologize for. it is not something that a boy,
years later at a frat party can try and belittle,
as if saying you are pretty for a black girl makes you feel better.
your great grandmother's soul and the woman before her give you
that milky white and charcoal black skin that can only be described
as the sky at midnight, when everyone else in the small town
you live in is asleep but you are awake and it is beautiful.
it is a hurricane with an infinite amount of water,
it is warfare at it's most addicting point and it is cataclysmic,
and they have no right to spray the dark color of the moon
onto their skin and pretend that the sun does not exist
until it is advantageous for them.
They are pretty.
They are beauty.
They are white,
and you with your Dominican kinks and sunburned skin
are not and this is something that now you do not like
but within time you will come to love.
Mar 28, 2016
Mar 28, 2016 at 8:01 PM UTC
The air was crisp and clean and clear,
The huntsman knew his time had come.
He gathered all equipment and gear.
Then shined and polished his gun.
He took a step, his boots polished black.
To his tiny little wife he blew a kiss back
Off, he was, to capture his prized buck.
She waved goodbye wishing him luck.
He got to his post, stood there and waited.
Patiently, with his traps he had baited.
For a time he remained quiet and still.
This kind of game was his kind of thrill.
Lo and behold, with rage and adrenaline
A perfect opportunity made its rise.
He steadied his rifle, an expert marksman.
He shot the young buck between its eyes.
In a moment it was done
And the huntsman had won.
The poor creature had no chance to fight.
It had fallen to the earth
No cry made it's birth
A silent victim in the night.
Time had come for homebound journey,
With the sun setting on both heads.
Only one of them back with family,
The other became family's dread.
The huntsman took his brand new trophy
And hung high the brown skinned creature.
Hand in hand with his wife he stood boldly
"I was the one to end this ******
Apr 29, 2015
Apr 29, 2015 at 3:04 PM UTC
To everyone
Subjected
Arrested
And put to rest
In a coffin
I apologize to every single person that isn't apart of the majority
I apologize for a race so far into themselves they fail to see murals
Because lately all they've cared about is how simple a blank white canvas is
The only way to make art is to have color
Lately I've turned off the news because of how embarrassed I am
Of a country that undermines success of women
Takes rights from gay people
And openly ****** black boys and men and women in this country
But walk away to their white houses
With their white families
And teach their white kids
That this is America
That America isn't slowly turning into a second holocaust slowly killing off everyone who isn't their definition of pure
Except instead of chambers
This deadly gas is inhaled by us everyday
Because it hasn't stopped
And more people
That have seen
Black boys
Fall from a bullet
Walk away without conviction
This poem was written to make
Every splinter in a wood coffin of a Martyr to shake
To hear what I am saying
And not to accept my apology
For years of abolishment
But to understand that we don't all come from hate
And that every time I am told I am the problem
I just say I'm sorry
Because
Of my race
Not me
Black fathers shouldn't have to call their sons to be safe when walking home
Mothers shouldn't have to tell daughters that it's okay to be just a housewife
It's only okay to do what you want
So do what you want
Stand up
And never stand down
Aug 22, 2014
Aug 22, 2014 at 7:42 PM UTC