All Over the Place: Do Black Lives Matter?

Because of How Saddened I am by Racism

By Michael H. Brownstein


[https://youtu.be/75Giyui9ZB0]

—because of the New Orleans Massacre (1866), the Opelousas Massacre (1868), the Colfax Massacre (1873), the Carroll County Courthouse Massacre (1888), the Wilmington Insurrection (1898), the Tulsa Race Riot (1921), the Rosewood Massacre (1923), the Cicero Race Riot (1951), the Orangeburg Massacre (1968), and at least three dozen more.

—and because [a] woman decked out in one of President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” caps waved a Confederate flag at a Black Lives Matter protest in Branson, Missouri, on Sunday while she praised the Ku Klux Klan and vowed to teach hate to her grandchildren. “I’m teaching them to fuckin’ hate all of you people,” the woman, identified by the Springfield News-Leader as Kathy Bennett, said Sunday evening. “I will teach my grandkids to hate you all.” She spoke from the bed of a pickup, then climbed up into it to wave the flag, raise a fist and call out, “KKK belief!” [—HuffPost]

White lives matter, the man said from the middle of the street,
and before I could reply, jammed on the gas, gone.
But white lives are not endangered, nor are they injured or at risk.

Tell me of a white woman – or white man – who does not resist arrest,

follows the officer’s directions, and then dies of a knee to a neck,
an avalanche of bullets to the back, a choke hold over a cigarette sale,
a beating off camera in a jailhouse, a kicking with steel-toed shoes.
You cannot find one. I did the research. There are no examples.

But a black man – or black woman – that is a question too easily answered.

Show me a town of white people who were destroyed because of rumor

and anger, jealousy and prejudice. Again – this does not happen.

But an African-American town, there are too many examples, a long list.

Show me consequences when the white mob riots, destroys buildings,

lives, crippling and executing women, men and children. For too long,

there were not any. Perhaps there still will not be. Who knows?
On the other hand, there are always consequences for their victims.

Always. A riot breaks out started by whites, people die, property is damaged

and a black man is tried for inciting a riot he had no beginning hand in.

This is not a tale of racism, this is a fable of what racism causes, impacts,

tears to threads and shreds into skins and blood to rot in forest and swamp.

No, not a fable. This is an elegy to the death and the dying, the hurt and innocent,

a poem for a battered people who suffered a holocaust across the oceans

to arrive here to become part of another holocaust that goes on and on and on –

it does not end. This is a tombstone for all of the unknown dead, the forgotten,

the lynched who did nothing wrong and the lynched who were in the wrong place

and the lynched who were burned alive and castrated and cut to bleed out.

Look at the white faces. They are celebrating. They are insanity personified.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.