Southern Elimination Piece

after Michael Ondaatje

Some people have told me that this subject is not the proper concern of an artist or of art. On the contrary, I hold the position that there are times when an artist must examine and reveal such strange and secret brutality. It's my expression and I stand by it.

--William Christenberry

Those who think the Civil War "really wasn't about slavery."

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White people who've felt edgy when a black person entered the swimming pool.

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All those who proclaim the value of the public schools but send their own children to predominantly white private institutions.

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Anyone who has ever ridiculed the use of sunscreen lotion by African Americans.

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White girls who dated black guys in order to enrage their fathers.

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Anyone who ever used the term "our negroes" (or any variation thereof).

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Certain state governments that continue to fly the Confederate flag.

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Public and private high schools that also fly it, and dress their mascots in Confederate uniforms and call them "Rebel."

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The "Ole Miss" "Rebels."

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Everyone who doesn't understand exactly what the problem is with weekend-long Civil War re-enactments that attract large numbers of under-employed, minimally-educated working-class white men from places like Johnson City, Tennessee, and Goldsboro, North Carolina.

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The many who think that black people are "just naturally better dancers," scared of water, and physiologically unsuited to cold climates.

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All those who have washed up after shaking hands with a person of African-American descent.

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The many who think black people "smell different."

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Everyone who thinks racism in the South is mostly a characteristic of working-class white men.

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Those who don't like to "go to Atlanta anymore because it's gotten too black."

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White people who use the n-word.

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Black people who use it, also.

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Grown men and women who have stumbled over the phrase "African American," and then, embarrassed, blurted out "or whatever they want you to call them these days!"

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Women who didn't return for their follow-up appointments when the gynecologist assigned by the HMO turned out to be black.

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Anyone who has ever described the color of an African-American person's skin with reference to foodstuff.

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Those who do not revere Rosa Parks.

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Anyone who has forgotten Emmett Till.

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Or his mother raising the lid of the coffin so the world could see what they did to her boy.

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Those who have walked through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., without making the connection.

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Anyone unmoved by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

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For they are those who fail to imagine the lives of others.

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Or feel, perhaps, that some are less human than themselves.

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And so are free to minimize the pain of other human persons.

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All those who minimize the pain of other persons.

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And all those who cause it.

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Pain.

Kate Daniels, a native of Richmond, Virginia, teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She is one of the founding editors of Poetry East and the author of three volumes of poems, The White Wave (winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize), The Niobe Poems, and Four Testimonies. Daniels is completing My Poverty, her fourth collection.

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