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The poem was submitted a year ago, and reading it made me realize how rare, if not unheard of, it is for white poets to confront in their work the intimate lineage of racism that exists within their own families.
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This is true because there is a superficiality about language prevalent today that is directly attributable to coming to terms with institutional and individual racism. Perhaps it's inevitable. Most people are superficial so it stands to reason the response to the language of racism would be superficial. It's a mass movement.
I'm a poor white guy from the rural South U.S. and my earliest realizations of the contradictions in the white racism that I was being instructed in came through language. But because of the type of focus on language that dominates today it is impossible for me to talk about that without running the risk of being run out of town.
One example, with the necessary words removed. I was told over and over that African Americans (n-word removed) were no account, lazy people who wanted someone else to take care of them because they were too lazy to work. I was supposed to nod my head to this. Everyone around me nodded their head to this. At the same time, whenever many of the farmers and farmhands came in from a day's work they would sit down and wipe off the sweat and declare they had "worked like an African American" (n-word removed.) At a certain point the contradiction became apparent to me. Why were a people who were unconditionally lazy and irresponsible used as an example of hard work. If these men knew African Americans were lazy, why was working like them meant they had worked hard? This was the sort of thing that got caught in my brain when I was eight or so.
My point is that by not being able to use the language of racisim to underscore the stupidity of racism and point how it kept white people stupid is frustrating. No, not because I'm a closet racist but because I'm a writer and it's impossible to express the impact that contradiction had on a boy without demonstrating the brutality of the language. In my reading, that is what happens in the Dickman poem. He's demonstrating the culture he was raised in but has suffered unfairly because the same man who says it's strange white people aren't dealing with their racist past deleted his poem and held him up for shame in the face of people who are superficial about the language. It was a teachable moment and he caved.
I lived in a housing project for a while as a kid, before we moved to the country. We left the project because after losing a lawsuit battle the city had to integrate the project. Years later, me and my best friend, a black man from eastern North Carolina, wrote a fun little play titled "The (N-word plural) Are Coming, The (N-word plural) Are Coming." The title was a parody of a dumb movie about Russians. The idea was how ridiculous it was that every poor-white family in that project, and it was a large project covering several blocks, ran out of there like the place was on fire as soon as they received word it was going to be integrated. Many moved into much worse situations because they were single mothers as my mom was. The play was about the absurdity of white people, but because of the title, which wasn't so outrageous in the 80s when it was written, I could never pull it out now--if I could find it, which is doubtful.
I've gone on long enough. I have all respect for the damge language can do. I understand that words hurt and demoralize and humiliate. I also understand that history is history and when the moral focus becomes an algorithm it becomes impossible to ever truly and deeply take a look at our racist past.
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