Alte # 6 RACE

Four Poems

by Sparrow

American Military History, 1950-Present 

Why don’t we fight

anyone white?

The Difference

A drug dealer sells

white powder;

Donald Trump sells

“White Power.”

Black

I am white, but

I’m black inside.

In fact, everyone

is black inside,

unless they swallow

a flashlight.

White & Black 

White people are just 

pretending to be white.

Black people just 

appear to be black.

At night, they all go

home and sleep, raceless.

Bald Head Sally: Elegy for Richard Penniman 

by Zev Shanker

Well, I saw Uncle John with bald-head Sally

He saw Aunt Mary comin' and he ducked back in the alley,

Oh baby / Yeah baby, / woo, baby/

Havin' me some fun tonight, / yeah

Only now, after reading obits,

watching confessions on Letterman re-runs

and live performance meltdowns from 50 years ago,

 do I get why Long Tall Sally has no hair and

why Little Richard’s gonna have some fun tonight

for betraying Uncle John’s closet to Aunt Mary.

Only now, after weeding with masks

on this cold Covid19 Mother’s Day afternoon

do I hear in the anthem to misery, incest, betrayal and drag,

the voice of the preacher from Holiness Church,

screaming from Macon for 87 years

an enduring faith, built long for speed,

everything’s goin’ right, / everything’s alright.

Mayan Girl

by Anna Wrobel

for Jakelin Caal Maquin, 8 years old, who died of dehydration at Border Control

focus on a face

one face in the rush

and the crowd

a little face

round

sleepy

Mayan cheeks

dark eyes

a sweetness

like amber maple

she sees me

we lock eyes

she wonders about

a big woman

so much taller than

she will ever be

her father nearby

reads a Spanish paper

while she gazes at me

in a native tongue

even anthropologists

have forgotten

I wet-less spit three times

as taught by refugees of

another American journey

her father, mine

her full cheeks, mine

her lost-between languages

inner speech, mine

bless the small

child of migration —

may New York City not crush you

may America come to know you

may you grow beyond

the servitude assigned

to your parents

by big Gringos

and hold fast

your great Mayan beauty

THE SECOND SELMA MARCH

by Marc Jampole

“I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm…”

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

It was on TV

for all the world to see:

the bloodied men and women

reeling on the bridge,

the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama,

feel with them the billy clubs,

hornbean branches, rifle butts

on blackbrown arms and legs, blackbrown noses, chins, 

and lash of bull whips

swinging hard by hate-sieged men

in uniforms and gas masks, 

tear gas melting lungs and eyes,

on TV for all to see, the bleeding broken

borne on arms and stretchers into church.

As one the viewers rise

from beer or dinner, stand and cry,

Is this my land, is this

the soil of equal hopes, of equal dreams?

and in a common rapture east to west,

people stop their meetings, drop their jobs,

board buses, railcars, airplanes, autos

bound for bloody Selma for another march, 

another chance to show the world,

to show themselves they live in freedom’s land. 

Dead, dead, dead

if I should march to Edmund Pettus Bridge,

closed-door Martin’s dread of next day’s plan

before a watching world, confronts

protected points, every ledge and rock along the way,

every liquored angry cracker white with smarts:

lay of the land, way to escape

after drawing, pulling, piercing him with searing shot.

My greater fear:

to die or disappoint?

to cease to be or cease to matter? 

March he does

leading new recruits from every state

before the pens and cameras, before the snakelike

seething men, march he does,

a new rhythm haunting him, a fearless rhythm,

relentless echo rhythm,

sun blister cloud water wind shatter rhythm,

rhythm ready to pay the price,

peaceful ordnance steady step and turn.

And thousands march along, and multi-millions 

watch on screens as at the bridge the troopers wave

their clubs and court orders

and stop them, but only from crossing:

Martin prays,

declares freedom victorious,

turns home to wait

for briefs in court, the slower march,

inevitable camp and walk, sing and praise,

five days fifty miles to Alabama’s capitol steps,

thirty thousand strong to witness Martin ask

How long, not long, not long at all.

And the Race Goes On

by Reba Carmel

At the end of third grade in my Brooklyn Jewish school, I came home with an Honor Card in Hebrew from Mr. Benjamini (who others decided was Benja-meany). My mother had won the Hebrew medal when she graduated from Brooklyn College in 1946, and here I was with my own achievement that seemed just as grand to me. Little did I realize that I had entered a race with her. I could not even compete in the beauty category — she was blond, statuesque, and filled a room similarly to the early Barbara Stanwyck. She had plenty of wrist- and elbow-length, buttery leather gloves, and broad shoulders around which she would have loved to fling any number of fur wraps. She possessed all the glitz and glamour an Orthodox Jewish divorcée, whose parents had died and who had been stuck with a somewhat shlumpy kid, could possibly imagine for herself. 

She also excelled in school. Hence our race. Her cum laude would be my magna. Her profession of teacher would become my lawyer and then rabbi.  Her failed marriage would be my success. 

But at 44 she was erased by cancer. And I am still trying to catch up to her: to her smile, her grace, and her perpetual innocence about the idea that any-one on Earth would intentionally abuse another human being, emotionally, psychologically or economically. She may have accommodated the pain of irrevocable loss, but never the grinding claustrophobia of being on the wrong end of inequity. Mom, I wish the whole world would catch up with you.  

by Esther Cohen

My family of origin 

All Jews on Every Single Side

at every family gathering

Eastern Europeans no one 

ventured

outside the boundaries loved 

what they knew

Jews Jews Jews

I wanted a different life

myself as Josephine Baker

I wish there was a good reason

reasons come afterwards

black boyfriend in college

he played the flute he was not

a Jewish doctor what will happen

my father asked not an unusual 

question

I didn’t know but said I hoped

maybe my generation would

marry one another No Matter What 

made my father Very Nervous

where did you get that idea

he said and I did not give him

a satisfying answer

then I married an Armenian

(he married a Jew) we adopted

a Chilean son who married an 

African woman

a mixed race child with Jewish 

and Armenian

grandparents they use the word 

blended

we are a blended family

when you gain something you 

lose something too

a family that doesn’t look alike 

I did not become

Josephine Baker Jewish 

grandmother still

same hope I had before maybe 

if we could

just figure out a way.

Race: The Beginning of an Etymological Inquiry

by Helen Engelhardt

Are we running or dividing? Are we competing or dismissing? Jesse Owens did both simultaneously at the Berlin Olympics hosted by Adolf Hitler in 1936. 

Why do we use this one four-letter word to describe a current of water turning a wheel, or two- or four-legged animals circling a track as fast as they are able for sport, or to classify human characteristics and then load that word with false assumptions to justify the ways we structure society?

It’s mostly an English thing. Other Indo-European languages have two separate words for these two separate concepts. Hear now a story from the northern lands :

The first “race” goes to a linguistic gift from Old Norse and Old English. “Rase” meant narrative, a course of conduct; emerges as a contest against rivals in 1510.

The other word, the one that pierces our hearts, came along with William when he Conquered the British Isles in 1066. Race from Razza honors the ancestors, their families and tribes, then  speakers of a common language. Finally, by the 17th century, race refers to physical traits. Modern scholarship regards race as an assigned identity based on rules made by society. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.

When did race become a word that goes beyond dispassionate observation of skin tones and eye folds and hair textures? When did it become a weapon in the service of kidnapping, enslavement,  torture, murder , daily insult and denial of human rights? That’s another, more complicated story.