This pseudo-poem comes out of some recent experiences of frustration, beginning with recognizing my own desire for what I am calling a “white confidante” in moments of great tension in a diverse class examining race relations in education this past semester. After that, a wacked out guy screaming, exasperated, at Jerica on 8th & Burleigh: “I’M WHITE!” as if their comraderie through skin color would provoke her to give him change for the bus and treat him preferentially. Finally, while riding my bike through FloridaBrookfield today, I arrived at an elementary school and asked directions back to my Grandad’s road (I rode pretty far, and got pretty dang lost). This stranger inserted several comments into his directions about how he didn’t want me to go through certain neighborhoods because “you know, there’s a lot of…. (dramatic pause)… in there,” etc. I know what he was referring to because I had just ridden through those neighborhoods in the plain-as-day noon sunlight: they were smaller houses, and lots of Mexican and Black families… SURPRISE!… minding their own business. For some reason this arrogant guy assumed I would know what he meant by “THAT kind of neighborhood.” My anger fumed the whole ride home. I am sick of this phenomenon of white people seeking safe places with one another, not based on culture or music or language or something beautiful, but solely based on an us vs. them mentality… the fear of the non-whites. As if white people really need more safe places. It’s really gross and I am sick of being considered part of this clan.

Someday when I am older and wiser, I will probably look back on entries like this and be embarrassed by my fiery and blind retorts to these situations. But for now, the wisdom I have is all I got, and I’m pissed. My response: muttering angry retorts in Spanish the whole bike ride home, a bad poem on some wussy blog, and perhaps growing the wisdom and love to next time somehow respond and defend in a relevant way. Oy.

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Don’t make me your white confidante.
The color of my skin should not incriminate me.
My ancestry alone does not make me an accomplice to your domination.

My pale complexion divides me from you if you think I know what you mean by “those people” -
If you think I agree with you that that is a “bad neighborhood” -
If you think that I feel threatened by immigrants, or music, or differentness.

My heritage does not fill in the blanks for me when you trail off in sentences -
“That neighborhood has a lot of… you know,”
“I don’t want to send you through there because of the…”
I do not get the idea.
And I am not accepting of your racism just because you implied rather than slurred. 

Don’t assume I know what you are hinting at.
Don’t assume I feel a kinship with you and your stale perceptions.
We’ve all heard it all before.
Imperialism is not my only hereditary option for a world view
and I refuse to be driven by fear. 

I am bound to my people by freedom
Culture, richness, poverty and simplicity
Food and language

An undiscerning God, taking on the humblest of children - 
my brothers, my sisters, and me -
one in the faith, one in the struggle.
Even those who I haven’t met or who don’t know it yet
because through the oppressed shines the pure heart of the Kingdom.

Join me instead in rejecting our scripted role as the oppressors,
in a long line of murderers and evangelists,
a sword in one hand, a Bible in the other -

No estoy de acuerdo contigo
solo porque del color de mi piel.
No me atrape en la herencia de nuestra raza.

I resist becoming a product of the suburbia from which I came,
so don’t make me your white confidante.