From up high
And inside
People are all the same
Either pin points on a map
Ants in sand
Like so many critters caught in harsh kitchen light
Or, in their souls, united by love, family, spirituality,
Mischief, joy and anger
As much a like as you
And me
As your mother and your cousin are to you
But viewed anyway else
From street level,
Passing cars
As they walk by when you gaze upon them
From wide windowed restaurants
They become abstractions
Defined by the crazy color coding that makes pink skin white
Brown skin black
And so on in the imprecise words we use to talk about each other
Our shared humanity falls away in our color coded definitions
That were original tools of masters on slaves
That now exist to divide as arbitrarily as lines on an out of date
Map
Invested in these definitions
These death defying fictions of the eye
So deep into these illusions that could we (I)
Can’t define myself without this divisive signage
People use phrases “We are all human beings”
As an all purpose, too facile, too easy to dismiss
Defense against color coded hatred
But we are trapped
Like flies by a spider
In a narrative that separates us
Not simply from each other
But our truest selves
To be a colony
Is to be a nipple that’s sucked
A river that’s drained
A child trained but
Not educated
A tree who’s roots
Are not its own
Who’s fruit falls on faraway soil
Feeding the mother country
But not the mother land.
So what is this hue called Black
It is a color
A culture
A code
Conduct
Comedy
Cancer
Or just on this thin reed
We use to grasp the intangible?
But my questions are ultimately irrelevant
Back in the __ century
“whiteness”
Was invented
To separate
Divide
And conquer
Whiteness was first
And foremost
A tool
Like sickles in a sugar cane field
A social and economic
Weapon of mental war fare
Whiteness was an adjunct to
Colonialism
A verbal sickle
Swung to slice
The self-image of the “other’
Whether confronted in Asia
Subjugated in Africa
Or discovered in the New World
Whiteness became a glue
That held together nations
Engaged in bloody adventures in
Exotic
Dark
Dusky
Lands
Where tea
Diamonds,
Gold
Cotton
And people
(So many people)
were the true coin of the realm
So we were either Godless savages
Or spiritually promiscuous
Our worship of too many Gods
Of the spirits in the land and in the water and in the trees
Offensive to people who saw resources
Where we saw life
We believed in animism
So they treated us as animals
We were natives
Then were captives
And then we were cargo
Chained and beaten
Raped and emasculated
Shipped and stacked
Across seas and oceans
Tossed out
Like discarded trash
When afflicted with scurvy
Syphilis
Hunger
Heartbreak and fear
Loses so deep oceans fill with our bones
Our tears
Our cheeks
Over flow
Over waves
Over board