Feedback request

[judecorp]

The final project for my Race and Ethnicity class is due soon. My professor is very flexible and basically said we can create anything in the universe that has anything to do with Race and Ethnicity. So I scribbled the beginnings of a poem, while I was at work, that I'm thinking about cleaning up and handing in. I'd like thoughts, friends.

Thanks in advance!


When I was small enough
to sit in the tiny wooden desks that
we scrubbed each June with pads of steel wool,
I believed that racism was a thing
of the distant past; as old as my father.
I knew that Rosa Parks had refused
to give up her seat on the bus
and I cheered.
I knew that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
had a dream
and his dream was that one day his
children would be judged not by
the color of their skin, but by
the content of their character.
My heart soared.
The Civil Rights Movement had come and gone.
We sang "We Shall Overcome"
and "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" at recess,
skipping over yellow jumpropes.
We said that it didn't matter what color you were,
that God loved you anyway,
even if you were Black!
It was eight-year-old fact:
we were not judged by the color of our skin,
we were not denied housing or employment or seats.
Row after row of little, wooden desks
scratched with generations of hot pink Brillo.
Row after row of little White children
blinded by Caucasian and middle-class privilege,
socialized to segregate, to separate, to stand aside.
Dr. King had a dream,
and Ms. Parks has a seat on the bus,
but it would be up to me,
once I had grown out of my wooden desk
(maybe even when I was as old as my father!),
to overcome,
To Change the World.

Comments

Re:

[judecorp.livejournal.com]

Heh, I hadn't even thought about the international flavour of the thing (and the Brillo), mostly because I was handing it in to my american professor in my american university. ameri-centric, yup. I just /love/ the word Brillo. Heck, I was poor, we prolly used the store brand Brillo anyway. ;)

I am now muddy at your muddiness. So maybe after I've schlepped through work and volunteering and have my night-brain on, I will go through this again and see if I'm understanding what I wrote only because I wrote it.

Thanks!