dear white america

“dear white america” is a prose poem, meaning it’s not written in verse like a traditional poem and thus doesn’t utilize line breaks. Instead, it relies on other qualities to cue to the reader that it is a poem, such as prominent rhythms and repetitions, both of which are present here. The speaker can be Smith, someone close to Smith, or someone who shares Smith’s experiences of racism and racial disparity. The title, and the prose format, help to disguise the poem as a letter. It is a direct address to white America that uses the second person “you” throughout to implicate the reader.

Conversely, the speaker represents the Black community. The lower case used throughout the poem is a stylistic technique that has gained popularity in contemporary poetry, particularly with the rise of the internet and self-publication. In “dear white America,” it also acts to undermine America’s significance and lessen a hierarchy throughout the poem. Certain things do get capitalized however, such as God, and the names of certain members of the Black community. Outside of the title, America is capitalized. The poem is driven by its listing quality, which is furthered by the repetition of the ampersand. This is enacted to enforce the poem’s main thematic concern: that white America’s violence against Black communities is endless and ongoing.

The poem begins with the speaker invoking a binary between Earth and that which exists outside of it, which is dark and black. The speaker leaves Earth to go into the darkness in search of a new God, one that wasn’t chosen for them by white America, because they do not trust this white God. The summer is personified as “swallowing” the choir children and described as “blood-fat” (Line 4), making it monstrous. This acts in opposition to the innocence of the singing choir children; the only thing stronger than the grandmother’s faith is her fear for these children’s lives in the face of the oppressive and violent summer.

After making these observations, the speaker commands white America to “take your God back” (Line 5). They acknowledge the beauty in the church, in white America’s God, saying the songs are beautiful. In spite of this beauty, God does not lift up all people equally. The speaker invokes the story of Lazarus, whom Jesus restores to life four days after his death. Why could God not do this for Renisha McBride, who was murdered at 19 after knocking on someone’s door for help and mistaken for a burglar. Other deaths are listed as proof of God’s failures, including Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old boy who was murdered by a security officer for walking around a gated community with his hood up; and Jonylah Watkins, a six-month-old baby murdered in her father’s car when a gunman tried to kill him. The poet wants them to rise from their tombs, for their ghosts to be given their flesh and their blood back, for their flesh and blood (their families) to be given their children back. The poet uses the word “re-gifted” (Line 8) to play on the idea that life is a precious gift, though Black communities are not in control of when that gift is taken from them.

After this listing, the poet reminds the reader that they’ve left Earth as they are sick of white America telling them to return from where they came (Africa), while white America also claims to not see race. This idea that one does not see race, also referred to as color blindness, was a popular idea in the 1980s that demonstrated one was a good person by virtue of not noticing the differences between people. However, color blindness has now been correctly identified as a form of racial denial. If one claims to not see race, to not notice the color of someone’s skin, they are ignoring the history of power and hierarchy and thus ignoring racism. As the poem argues, ignoring the history that continues to contribute to the daily conditions of living as a Black person in America is incredibly harmful. By comparing it to the firmly established racist idea that Black people should “go back to Africa” (Lines 9-10), the speaker demonstrates the violence in color blindness. Smith then writes “neither did the poplar tree” (Line 10). The poplar tree is representative of the lynching of many Black men and women who were hung to death in the 19th and early-20th centuries. The poplar tree also can’t see race, but that doesn’t disentangle them from the racist and horrifically violent acts to which they are historically tied.

The speaker does however disentangle themselves, and the Black people, from white America’s violent past. The boats they speak of are meant to represent the slave ships that transported about 600,000 African people to America in the transatlantic slave trade. The speaker uses a parenthetical to qualify that they didn’t build these boats by saying “though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home” (Line 11). This references the nearly two million enslaved Africans who died on the Middle Passage, which refers to the stretch of the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the West Indies through which slave ships traveled. An insurmountable number of enslaved Africans did not survive the brutal conditions, and thus their bodies were thrown into the ocean.

The speaker then draws a parallel to those who died during passage: “we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too)” [Line 12]). The present-day American prison system is connected to slavery. White Americans cannot escape their origin story, and it is currently being replicated in the form of prisons, in which Black Americans are wrongfully incarcerated in horrific conditions and perform unpaid labor. In saying “we did not ask to be part of your America” (Lines 12-13), the speaker reminds the reader that they and their Black community were forcibly brought here. But they ask, “are we not America?” (Line 13). White America was forcibly built by enslaved people, and now those same people are houseless and abject, “her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?” (Lines 13-14). Smith uses questions to employ a kind of irony and to force the reader to think about what it would mean to answer.

Next, the speaker admits, “i can’t stand your ground” (Line 14). They cannot stand white America, but they also play on the phrase to “stand one’s ground,” emphasizing that they cannot defend white America. They are tired of white America’s “law” (Line 15), which they identify or rather expose as just recklessness. The speaker goes on to explain how each night they count their brothers, and in the morning, they count the “holes” they leave “when some do not survive to be counted” (Line 16). The holes are a symbol that reminds the reader of the specter of gun violence and bullet wounds that kill so many Black Americans. When the speaker reaches out for their community, there is nothing there, just absence. They say this is America’s “master magic trick” (Line 17), to make Black Americans disappear, to end their lives. The use of the word “master” reminds us once again of the legacy of slavery. The speaker then adds a supernatural element to the poem: “now he’s breathing, now he don’t. abra-cadaver. white bread voodoo” (Lines 18-19). There is death infused in America’s “magic.” White America believes they are innocent or at least claim to not have a hand in the death of Black people. But they place the guns in the hands of the Black community to “do their work.”

The speaker then directly addresses white people saying that they have tried to love them, but white America has been dismissive of their people’s deaths. White America spent [their] brother’s funeral “making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones” (Lines 21-22). Smith’s use of brunch invokes a culturally white and upper-class pastime. This frivolity is valued more by white America than the deaths of their Black citizens. Still, amidst all these endless deaths, white America asks, “why does it always have to be about race?” (Line 23). But Smith rightfully answers that white America decided from its very first day that it would be a country about race. Blackness is endlessly qualified; Smith uses the symbol of the asterisk to demonstrate this. The speaker explains that “there are no amber alerts for amber-skinned girls!” (Lines 26-27), demonstrating that America does not issue the same care and attention when Black girls go missing.

Smith then launches into anaphora by repeatedly listing “because,” once again citing the “reasons” for Black deaths. Emmett Till, who supposedly whistled at a white woman suggestively, was lynched at just 14 years old after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store. Huey P. Newton “spoke” and thus was murdered as a consequence of speaking out about his rights through the founding of the Black Panther Party. Martin Luther King “preached,” and he too was murdered as a repercussion for arguing against racism. Smith says “black boys can always be too loud to live,” and it is then that the reader understands that the “crime” of these Black men was taking up space, was having their voices heard. Time is the precious resource we are all given, but for the speaker’s family and people, it’s been taken. They ask, “how much time do you want for your progress?” (Lines 31-32) They remind us that these problems began with the inception of white America, and they ask us how long it will take us to change.

As a result, the speaker has left Earth to go somewhere where their people can be safe, where the color of their skin is the same color as the earth, which is to say natural. White America is reminded of the nature inherent in the color brown. But until that is the only thing their skin means in white America, the speaker says goodbye. They leave white America with war, and they take away their life so it can no longer be played with. Now that they have left earth, they are able to expand into the universe, they brush up against “everything [white America] beg[s] [their] telescopes to show [them]” (Line 36). Even in the universe, free from the Earth, white people try and exert their power. The speaker wants to rename the stars and the planets. They will create a new life free from white America and its ever-pressing dominance and violence, a place where white Americans cannot continue to inflict the many forms of violence they continuously do.