Color Complex

The poem “New Rules of the Road” by Reginald Harris never explicitly mentions skin color.  The painting of Trayvon Martin called “hoodie” implies to the audience that the poem will be making a statement on his brutal murder by George Zimmerman, but his name is never stated in the poem.  However, the abruptness of the indentations and jolting into each other as brutal, snippy, ugly statements made by racist authoritarians invokes feelings of unrelentless, unjust, and unrealistic orders piling on top of each other.  These orders such as “There is no right/ to travel…” and “Do not/ Resist/ you are a/ Thing” pile onto each other, the second person narration puts the reader in the place of a target of police brutality (Poetry and Protest 87).  

Depending on the reader’s social location, they will have different experiences with police contact.  Certainly, people of color who have experienced or are forced to live with the fears of police brutality may feel validated or triggered when reading the poem.  There are certainly a range of emotions and levels of empathy that any person can feel after reading this poem.  White readers,however, will never truly understand the horrors of being a target of police brutality.  The fact that this poem is in second person will force white readers to understand the distance from the horrors of racism that their skin color gives them.  Harris creates a reflection around distance or proximity directly depending on the racial social location of the reader.  Harris also speaks sociological truth to power by using a mocking voice of the oppressive white authoritarian.  

A poem that uses color- in this case black and white- more explicitly is Terrance Hayes’ “Some Luminous Distress.”  His opening stanza describes a “palatial and white” “great American space” that cannot save the speaker or the collective “us” (Poetry and Protest 91).  He contrasts this image of boring and insufficient American whiteness that falls short of substance or salvation with the phrase, “like hair, the black woman locked.”  Here, Hayes makes the connection between whiteness that delivers on none of its promises (i.e. abolition, de-segregation, a “post racial” America) and the imprisonment of black women. Using the bible and images of hellish horror, the speaker tells us that they are going towards “the night” presumably to defeat white supremacy without fear but also without false pretenses that whiteness will deliver anything worthwhile.  The tone is quite liberatory and reminds us of the braveness needed to run into the fight for justice.