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Change the Subject to Race

Todd Matson

Change the subject to race in a room
of white faces in a deep red state
and watch blank faces with
glassy eyes take over the
tension-filled room.

Listen as the quiet speaks
and grows louder and louder
until the silence itself is deafening.

False equivalencies begin to drop like rain.
No dog whistle interpreter necessary.
The surreal is the new real for
anyone wearing blinders.

“The white cop may have
been trigger happy, but look at the
checkered past of the unarmed black man.”

“Maybe if the unarmed black man wouldn’t
have been struggling to breathe, the white
cop wouldn’t have believed he was
resisting arrest or kept his knee
on his neck for 9 minutes
and 26 seconds.”

“We wouldn’t need
more restrictive voting laws
which we call election integrity, and
others call voter suppression, if black voters
weren’t committing so damn much voter fraud.”

So it goes.

Blue Lives Matter eclipses Black Lives Matter
as if a job is equivalent to a human life.
As if a job equals a human life.

White Lives Matter
steals the stage as if white folks
have ever doubted that white lives matter.


Not to be outdone, All Lives Matter grabs
the mic, glosses over black lives with
all lives even though black lives
have never really mattered to
so many who have never
lived black lives.

Read the room.

The tension can be cut
with a knife. Discomfort reaches
critical mass. Artful redirection is on
deck. Comic relief is waiting in the wings.

So it goes. And so it goes.

I don’t want to say this. I naively believed
we were becoming a post-racial society.
I was wrong. We are becoming an
Orwellian post-truth society.

Where is the courage
to love those who don’t look
like us? Let the vulnerability hangover
come. I am white. Take my heart. Break it.

Paint it black.

 

Previously Published by Soul-Lit: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry

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