Everything Resides in a Name
- Everything Resides in a Name
The day the white babysittercalls you colored, you believeyour birth parents were rainbows,unicorns, brightly hued fairiesdancing across the television screen—all beautiful, colorful things.
You ask if I like being called black,a term rich in value and tincture.I don’t mind, I say, explaining the wordis synonymous with African American,a color awash in continental drift.
Your question, in turn, reminds meof Alain Locke’s “The New Negro”and the student who, after reading it,decided all blacks were Negroes again.The label a litany through his essay I graded.
They can’t keep changing their nameinsists the woman who transposes the phrasepeople of color to colored people.Her refusal to keep it straightoffensive in so many ways.
Which brings me backto the little white boywho called you blackon the playground today,after pushing you roughly away. [End Page 12]
Artress Bethany White is the author of Fast Fat Girls in Pink Hot Pants (Aldabra Press, 2012). Recently poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, and The New Guard.
