Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman Read Free Book Online

age-old white rite of passage.
    * * *
    We always ask questions of those who came before.
    To be surveyed, then, is to have survived.
    Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?
    Answer: Because there was a white person coming down it.
----
    * * *
    How we are moved says everything
    About what we are to each other.
    Last year we stepped onto an elevator.
    We politely asked the white lady behind us
    If she could please take the next lift
    To continue social distancing.
    Her face flared up like a cross in the night.
    Are you kidding me? she yelled,
    Like we’d just declared
    Elevators for us only
    Or Yous must enter from the back
    Or No yous or dogs allowed
    Or We have the right to refuse
    Humanity to anyone .
    Suddenly it struck us:
    Why it’s so perturbing for privileged groups to follow restrictions of place & personhood.
    Doing so means for once wearing the chains their power has shackled on the rest of us.
    It is to surrender the one difference that kept them separate & thus superior.
    Meanwhile, for generations we’ve stayed home, [segre]gated, kept out of parks, kept out of playgrounds, kept out of pools, kept out of public spaces, kept out of outside spaces, kept out of outer space, kept out of movie theaters, kept out of malls, kept out of restrooms, kept out of restaurants, kept out of taxis, kept out of buses, kept out ofbeaches, kept out of ballot boxes, kept out of office, kept out of the army, kept out of hospitals, kept out of hotels, kept out of clubs, kept out of jobs, kept out of schools, kept out of sports, kept out of streets, kept out of water, kept out of land, kept out of kept in kept from kept behind kept below kept down kept without life.
    Some were asked to walk a fraction / of our exclusion for a year & it almost destroyed all they thought they were. Yet here we are. Still walking, still kept.
    To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.
    Non-being, i.e., distance from society—social distance—is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white.
    For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?
    Fundamentally, supremacism means doing anything to keep one’s sole conceit,
    Even if it means losing one’s soul.
    It means not wearing the mask that would save you, for that would mean taking off one’s privilege.
    It means, always, choosing poisonous
    Pride over
    Preservation,
    Pride over
    Nation,
    Pride over
    Anyone or anything.
    This realization is not ours.
    It is.
    Art, if fact,
    Is both a method & a finding,
    An answer in the inquiry.
    It is what is found
    & the manner in which it is discovered.
    Anyone who has lived
    Is an historian & an artifact,
    For they hold all their time within them.
    Reconciliation is in this record we make.
    If we remember anything,
    Let it be to remember.
    A road forward
    We shall have
    If we keep
    Walking. ***

    *** To this day, drivers are seven times less likely to halt at the crosswalk for African American pedestrians than for whites. See Courtney Coughenour et al.
    Walking as a pedestrian involves “collaborative processes by which users of public space come to trust each other.” See Nicholas H. Wolfinger.
    The yielding of walkways & thus power in public spaces is not a “Black” or “historical” issue, but the contemporaneous bedrock of status interaction in shared spaces. Research has found that African Americans as well as Latinx pedestrians tend to yield to whites. Women often yield their path to men & dark-skinned women yield to lighter-skinned women. See Natassia Mattoon et al.

DISPLACEMENT
    A.
    We’ve come so far ,
    We say,
    But we have further to go .
    In physics, we’re taught that
    Displacement & distance differ.
    Displacement is merely the space between
    Where an object starts & where it ends.
    A ______________