Poem for a white boy

dedicated to J.P.

I

The white boy
(I know he has a name, a mother, a heart that bears a secret ache,
but I'm too angry to acknowledge his complexity right now)
demands
of the professor that he feel safe in our poetry class.

The white boy looks at me
(the angry black woman with Medusa hair who seconds before
bawled out another white boy - the one with the lovely
surfer-blonde locks, whose name I'm also too angry to use-
for making a racist/homophobic remark)
and says:
"I took a women's literature class and another class on race relations
and I felt like everyone was trying to make me feel guilty because
I'm white and male. I want to be safe in this class,
so if I say something that upsets certain people
(he looks directly into my eyes)
I don't want to
fear being attacked
because I don't know what it's like
to be a woman or to be black
and it's not my fault."

What I want to say to the white boy - but don't - is:
How can you take a women's lit and race relations class
and say you know nothing of being a woman or black?
What did you do those sixteen weeks?
Tune the women and the blacks out?
I'm glad you squirmed in your seat.
I praise all of those breasts and brown faces that
made you feel
unsafe
responsible.
And after sixteen weeks of living as the Other
why do you maintain the false assumption that
safety is your inalienable right?

What woman or person of color is ever safe in a classroom?
Where was my safety when I offered the class the words of a
NativeAmericanLesbianWomanPoet
whose childhood wounds
still bleed
(a woman whose soul, I confessed, touched and shadowed my
own)
and two white boys threw her back in my face as if
I had served them a plate of trash.
Dismissing her life because it was "abnormal"
and not suitable for a "general audience."

But even if you hadn't taken a class
didn't your momma teach you nothin'?
Does it not occur to you that if you say
"Those people," or "Abnormal," or "Why should I care?"
some angry black woman might cuss you out?
Why should the professor keep you safe from that?

Who protected me from the white kids
(screaming: "Kill the niggers!")
who tried to over turn my bus in high school?
Who protected me from Mr. Rigby's roaming hands
searching out my fourteen-year-old breasts
in the supply closet of the biology room,
breathing hot-coffee-breath down my neck?
("I'll give you an A if you let me touch them.")
Who protected me from Miss Fosbury (a k a Fossil Face)
my eighth grade English teacher
who declared: "You speak good for one of your people"?
("Speak well," bitch)

White boy,
what supreme power
grants you the arrogance
to assume the world should be a safe place for you?
I knew
from the age of five,
when Chester Simmons kicked me in the stomach
and called me Lard Belly
that, for me,
life was going to be a fight.
(James Baldwin: "All safety is illusion.")

II

I have never felt safe.
Only now, when the house is quiet and dark,
my son and mother asleep safely in their beds,
my day tucked in and kissed good-night,
my ears lulled by distant train whistles
(I imagine fog horns off a misty coast)
does my body grow limp,
a wilting green
grateful to fold in upon itself.

III

J.P.
you think I don't care
(opinionated bitch is probably what you think of me)
but I see you.
Hear in the angry words of your poem
the cry for understanding,
sympathy-
you just want me to give you a break.

Demanding the last word,
I read...