Racism Poetry

I’m Not My Skin
 


I’m not my skin
I’m not your expectations
I’m the soul that lives in me,
I’m that which the blind can see
And all that you can’t see.

I’m the little boy confused
By the world’s segregation,
I’m the laugh of their talk,
I’m not trying to be you,
Look at my stiff black hair?
It stands tall like trees in the forest:
Its feels so pure and sets me free.
Look at my thoughts, they are diverse
And full of colors.

I’m not my skin
I’m not who you think Iam,
I’m the river that flows and blesses
Every oasis with a touch of water.
I’m the man who sees no color.

Touch my tan skin
And you’ll see that I’m human too.
I’m not trying to gain approval from you,
I just want you to know that I’m not my skin.
My culture is scarred by the human traitors,
I owe no forgiveness to any man alive…
Does the way I walk, smile or wear my afro
Make me any less human?
Should I be ashamed of my own skin?

I’m not my skin,
I’m not my hair,
I’m the soul that lives within,
Poverty, disease, loss of human dignity
Are my arch enemies besides man.

Your broken kisses heal my human body,
You spite for a person of a person my kind
Cannot break or shake to take me away into any
Sort of mortal shame for the skin that covers my
Bones and muscles.
My hearts beats rhythmically like a Zambian drum,
My broad nose inhales the air my ancestors left,
My eyes see the moon, sun and the stars
That Bantu forefathers
Worshiped and sacrificed lives for…
And this is who I’ll always be.

I’m not my skin,
I’m the simple person you’ll never know,
I’m the culture will never touch,
I’m the proud onyx soul you’ll never kiss.

I’m that little girl on mother’s back
Who she carried whenever
She went begging on the street,
I’m that lost lone needle in the hay.
You can only see my russet skin..
In me you can only see a slave,
A second class human!
I’ll continue to walk tall like the beautiful
African queen my mother told me I’m.

I’m not my skin,
Like you I’m not perfect, I react when I don’t mean to.
To kill me, take away my skin
And throw it beyond my children’s reach.
My black skin rages your emotions…
Your lust for another killing of my kind
Fuels every breath you take.

Here’s a knife tear my skin apart?
You’ll see that the blood I hold is scarlet…
Like a human’s or any other animal’s.
When my heart is broken I cry just like you do,
To you good skin means bright and not black.
The sun can’t hurt me I tamed her,
The night’s creatures can’t see me
Because my skin camouflages my soul.
Your bitter words can’t hurt me, I hate them not you.

Nuchi Laccini - Zambia 

My Hair Does Not Define Who I Am

I am more than the 4C type
It does not get me where I’m going in life
The kinkiness does not exemplify what I am capable of
Just how I present myself out of love

I am more than the twist outs, braid outs, and wash and go’s
Even more classy than the glamorous afro
I am deeply enriched in intelligence
To support all of my investments

I am more than the olive oil and coconut oil
I’m just in love with my future to which I am loyal
I am concentrated to make it through
Just like the conditioner and shampoo

I am more than the natural hair product
Even though it not working would just be my luck
I am on a bright path towards my future
In which my dreams only need to mature

I am more than the deep conditioning and protein treatments
For my success does not have limits
I am going to be somebody
But I don’t know if the world is ready

I am more than the bad hair days
Because I conquer them in many ways
I am often misunderstood
In fact I knew that I would

I am more than my hair
Including its texture and style that makes people stare
I am only focused on the characteristics and traits that make up my personality
Therefore, my hair does not define who I am most importantly

Chekayah

Black Girl, Black Girl

 

When I was in middle school, I went through a phase.
I wore distressed skinny jeans and alternative rock band tees and studded belts and belt chains and low canvas converse of nearly every color in the rainbow.
I listened to what to some, would be called "white people music."
I didn't know how to control my hair back then, so a ponytail with more of a mane than a tail was the backdrop to the abstract work of art that was my pre-teen face.
Amtrak braces going across jaggedy mountain teeth and two bushels of eyebrows protecting the fortress of chunky black glasses.
I was different.
There were a group of girls at my school that were more popular than the rest.
They all wore Hollister, Abercrombie, carried Coach wristlets and pranced around in this season's new Ugg boots. And only those.
They were acquaintances, but not friends.
I thought they didn't like me because I was different.
And then I remember my sixth grade self thinking about all the differences between me and these girls.
And I remember my sixth grade self zeroing in on one specific difference that I had to question more than the rest.
And I remember my sixth grade self asking my mom on the car ride to school,
"Mommy? Do you think they would like me more if I was white?"

And my mom didn't know exactly how to respond.
Part consideration and part hesitation. She didn't know how quite to respond.
Because being one of the few black beings growing up in white suburbia did not exactly provide the best answers to these types of questions.
But you know what she told me? 
The truth.
"Maybe sweetie. Maybe."
I remembered thinking that that was just so unfair, so rude, so ignorant of them.
And then I said, "Oh well. Their loss."

But now I'm 17. And social media is desensitizing my generation and granting people cyber courage to say things they would never say in the world outside their front door and attaining opinions that would never be claimed as their own if it weren't for this twisted society we let inside our homes.
Boys, NOT MEN, have become more picky, or excuse me, vocal about their preferences and choices in women lately on social media. And I quote:
"I only like snow bunnies and Latinas."
"I never once said black girls don't look good, I just said white and Spanish girls look better."
"I don't date black girls."
"Brazilian girls are the best then white girls then Spanish girls then dirt and then black girls."
End quote.

I am a black girl and I live in a world where the men who look just like my father with the same brown skin as me that I wear proudly tell me that they do not prefer my race of women, that we are at the bottom of the food chain, of the romantic hierarchy, of motherfucking society.
Black girls in a media picture get painted and depicted as bitter and loud and unattractive and uncivilized and uneducated and bestial and inhuman.
And that is not fair.
To me, my sister or my entire culture.

Just because my hair doesn't morph into perfect circular ringlets when wet or my complexion isn't fair enough to get off scotch free from the cops or I'm not mixed with enough nationalities to represent an entire melting pot, you're telling me you can't love me? Or you don't want to, because that's what society is telling you?

A surprising number of black males have been the culprits of this bullshit and buffoonery.
"I don't like black girls at all."
Look up from your insensitive tweet on your insensitive  phone in your insensitive hands and tell me what you see in front of you, feeding you, clothing you, loving you?
Your mother. A black girl.
When black men get murdered without justice across America, who is there, behind you, supporting you, standing up for you, fighting for you?
The black woman.

"Everybody has preferences, you have to respect them!"
Oh I'm all for respecting people's preferences but once their preferences lead them to disrespect me, fuck that, I don't know who told you respect was a one way street.
Stop feeding into society and basing the image of your ideal soul mate off of fetishes and novelties.
Stop throwing us into a corner and then turning us against each other with statements such as:
"Lightskin girls are winning"
"Brown skin girls are winning"
"Dark skin girls are winning"
Light, brown, dark, yellow, chocolate, caramel, copper - it does not matter.
We are all black girls and we all win together.

I do not want this racially infused hatred to be injected into my blood stream so that when I have a baby black girl she is born with insecurities.
I don't want her to come home to me and tell me that she likes a boy but she has to see, because she doesn't know if he likes black females.
I don't want her to come home to me and beg me to try and make her hair curlier or straighter or lighter or softer or longer because she doesn't think people will like her.
I don't want her to come home to me and tell me that she liked Devon but Devon liked Brittany more, and ask me, "Mommy? Do you think he would like me more if I was white?"
I do not want to give her the same answer my mom gave me.
I want to tell her, "No, sweetie, Devon doesn't like you because he's a fuck face who is blind to all the fantastic things that make you phenomenal."
I want to tell her that she can be loved no matter what her race is.
I want to tell her that love is based on the details of her heart and the contents of her mind, not the color of her hands that she will use to flip you bastards off.
I want to tell her, that just because the movies and tv portrays her as loud and uncontrollable, she doesn't have to be the opposite or just like it.
I want to tell her that if a man lumps her in and generalizes her by saying "He dates only black girls," she should dump his ass, because she is not a novelty.
I want to tell her that she doesn't need someone to love her, for her to love herself.
I want to tell her to empower herself and prove them all wrong.
I want to tell her to carry herself like royalty, no matter what she is told otherwise. 

Because she is a black girl. And that makes her a flawless queen.

kaitlynmcnab

Beautiful Black Woman

Beautiful woman this poem is for you
Full of beauty and grace
Rare black Queen sitting high on your throne
No one can take your place
Your heart is full of pure gold
Never to be played with
Bought or sold
Your Love is Patient Your Love is kind
Always trying to bring joy to others even when you can’t do it for yourself
And keeping them close in mind
A good woman is what you are
A woman to whom is proud of who she is and what she stands for
Never seeking definition from whom she is with
A strong woman is what I see when I look at you
One who can pick up the small pieces of her broken heart
And carry on as if she was never hurt in the first place.
When talking about this woman I can’t help but smile
Knowing the woman that I can speak so highly of is ME.

cwoods2119


India Arie:"I am not my Hair" Lyrics
 
[Talking:]
Is that India.Arie? What happened to her hair? Ha ha ha ha ha
Dat dad a dat da [4x] Dad a ooh

[Verse 1]
Little girl with the press and curl
Age eight I got a Jheri curl
Thirteen I got a relaxer
I was a source of so much laughter
At fifteen when it all broke off
Eighteen and went all natural
February two thousand and two
I went and did
What I had to do
Because it was time to change my life
To become the women that I am inside
Ninety-seven dreadlock all gone
I looked in the mirror
For the first time and saw that HEY....

[Chorus]
I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am not your expectations no no
I am not my hair
I ma not this skin
I am a soul that lives within

[Talking:]
What'd she do to her hair? I don't know it look crazy
I like it. I might do that.
Umm I wouldn't go that far. I know .. ha ha ha ha

[Verse 2]
Good hair means curls and waves
Bad hair means you look like a slave
At the turn of the century
Its time for us to redefine who we be
You can shave it off
Like a South African beauty
Or get in on lock
Like Bob Marley
You can rock it straight
Like Oprah Winfrey
If its not what's on your head
Its what's underneath and say HEY....

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
(Whoa, whoa, whoa)
Does the way I wear my hair make me a better person?
(Whoa, whoa, whoa)
Does the way I wear my hair make me a better friend? Oooh
(Whoa, whoa, whoa)
Does the way I wear my hair determine my integrity?
(Whoa, whoa, whoa)
I am expressing my creativity..
(Whoa, whoa, whoa)

[Verse 3]
Breast Cancer and Chemotherapy
Took away her crown and glory
She promised God if she was to survive
She would enjoy everyday of her life ooh
On national television
Her diamond eyes are sparkling
Bald headed like a full moon shining
Singing out to the whole wide world like HEY...

[Chorus 2x]

[Ad lib]
If I wanna shave it close
Or if I wanna rock locks
That don't take a bit away
From the soul that I got
Dat da da dat da [4x]
If I wanna where it braided
All down my back
I don't see what wrong with that
Dat da da dat da [4x]

[Talking:]
Is that India.Arie?
Ooh look she cut her hair!
I like that, its kinda PHAT
I don't know if I could do it.
But it looks sharp, it looks nice on her
She got a nice shaped head
She got an apple head
I know right?
It's perfect.
 

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MY AFRICA IN POETRY

 

A Far Cry From Africa 
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
'Waste no compassion on these separate dead!'
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
>From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
 

Homage to My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

Lucille Clifton 

 

 

An African Elegy

In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder
the wildebeest, zebra, the okapi, the elephant,
have enterd the marvelous. No greater marvelous
know I than the mind’s
natural jungle. The wives of the Congo
distil there their red and the husbands
hunt lion with spear and paint Death-spore
on their shields, wear his teeth, claws and hair
on ordinary occasions. There the Swahili
open his doors, let loose thru the trees
the tides of Death’s sound and distil
from their leaves the terrible red. He
is the consort of dreams I have seen, heard
in the orchestral dark
like the barking of dogs.


Death is the dog-headed man zebra striped
and surrounded by silence who walks like a lion,
who is black. It was his voice crying come back,
that Virginia Woolf heard, turnd
her fine skull, hounded and haunted, stopt,
pointed into the scent where
I see her in willows, in fog, at the river of sound
in the trees. I see her prepare there
to enter Death’s mountains
like a white Afghan hound pass into the forest,
closed after, let loose in the leaves
with more grace than a hound and more wonder there
even with flowers wound in her hair, allowing herself
like Ophelia a last
pastoral gesture of love toward the world.
And I see
all our tortures absolved in the fog,
dispersed in Death’s forests, forgotten. I see
all this gentleness like a hound in the water
float upward and outward beyond my dark hand.


I am waiting this winter for the more complete black-out,
for the negro armies in the eucalyptus, for the cities
laid open and the cold in the love-light, for hounds
women and birds to go back to their forests and leave us
our solitude.

. . .

Negroes, negroes, all those princes,
holding cups of rhinoceros bone, make
magic with my blood. Where beautiful Marijuana
towers taller than the eucalyptus, turns
within the lips of night and falls,
falls downward, where as giant Kings we gathered
and devourd her burning hands and feet, O Moonbar
thee and Clarinet! those talismans
that quickened in their sheltering leaves like thieves,
those Negroes, all those princes
holding to their mouths like Death
the cups of rhino bone,
were there to burn my hands and feet,
divine the limit of the bone and with their magic
tie and twist me like a rope. I know
no other continent of Africa more dark than this
dark continent of my breast.


And when we are deserted there,
when the rustling electric has passt thru the air,
once more we begin in the blind and blood throat
the African catches; and Desdemona, Desdemona
like a demon wails within our bodies, warns
against this towering Moor of self and then
laments her passing from him.


And I cry, Hear!
Hear in the coild and secretive ear
the drums that I hear beat. The Negroes, all those princes
holding cups of bone and horn, are there in halls
of blood that I call forests, in the dark
and shining caverns where
beats heart and pulses brain, in
jungles of my body, there
Othello moves, striped black and white,
the dog-faced fear. Moves I, I, I,
whom I have seen as black as Orpheus,
pursued deliriously his sound and drownd
in hunger’s tone, the deepest wilderness.


Then it was I, Death singing,
who bewildered the forest. I thot him
my lover like a hound of great purity
disturbing the shadow and flesh of the jungle.
This was the beginning of the ending year.
From all of the empty the tortured appear,
and the bird-faced children crawl out of their fathers
and into that never filld pocket,
the no longer asking but silent, seeing nowhere
the final sleep.


The halls of Africa we seek in dreams
as barriers of dream against the deep, and seas
disturbd turn back upon their tides
into the rooms deserted at the roots of love.
There is no end. And how sad then
is even the Congo. How the tired sirens
come up from the water, not to be toucht
but to lie on the rocks of the thunder.
How sad then is even the marvelous! 

Robert Duncan

 

 

Africa

A thousand years of darkness in her face,
She turns at last from out the centurys' blight
Of labored moan and dull oppression's might,
To slowly mount the rugged path and trace
Her measured step unto her ancient place.
And upward, ever upward towards the light
She strains, seeing afar the day when right
Shall rule the world and justice leaven the race.

Now bare her swarthy arm and firm her sword,
She stands where Universal Freedom bleeds,
And slays in holy wrath to save the word
Of nations and their puny, boasting creeds.
Sear with the truth, O God, each doubting heart,
Of mankind's need and Afric's gloried part. 

Joseph Seamon Cotter

 

 

A Trip Through Africa

All the noises, all the sounds, asleep.
Under seven streams sleeps fear.
And the elephant, so deep in sleep,
That you can sneak up, cut off his ear.
All the noises, all the sounds, asleep.
No rough axe will wake them, make them hear.
All the noises, all the sounds, asleep
In two eyes, two eyes still open deep—
The two eyes of God, still open deep.

Abraham Sutzkever 

 

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