Poets Resist began in 2017 in response to . . . well, you can guess.
It’s a current events poetry project of Glass: a Journal of Poetry, which seeks “poetry that enacts the artistic and creative purity of glass.”
My poem, “Suspect,” appears there today. The poem confronts a few aspects of racism: assumptions, rationalizations, and inaction. The speaker of the poem both is and is not me; perhaps that’s one way racism inhabits even well-intentioned white people.
The poem begins like this:
As many activists have noted, it’s well past time for white people to be reaching out to other white people to confront racism. I’m interested in thoughts that anyone might have about this, or about the poem, which can be read in its entirety here.
Michele Sharpe 
Racism has exploded with the generational patterns of repressed anger of being enslaved over centuries that has been passed down to those here now. I have watched it brew and stew over the years until affirmative action came into play. Since then I have seen it used as an excuse to gain power over the masses.
At the other end of the spectrum, it is the same. White supremacy seeded hatred in the south and that hatred has been passed down from one generation to the next. Children tend to learn what they live and mimic the words and sentiments they heard as children. Over time it becomes an unending tape that goes off in their head. They heard it so often they came to believe the sentiments that were spewed out of the mouths of their caretakers.
I am not black nor white – I am a brown island girl that has experienced the play of the race card in my youth. We were the darkest thing they ever saw and threw the racial slurs at us because they were jealous of our skin color, but it still hurt. It was unwarranted but it still hurt.
I feel the world would be better served without affirmative action and instead institute action on the fact that color does not make the man, woman or child. When the label of color is eliminated all that is left is a human being, and as human beings, we are all capable of growing up and moving past both the internal and external rhetoric that is thrown around like rice at a wedding.
Your poem, by the way, was perfect. The inferences in the last three paragraphs were spot on target 😉
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Love your simile – “thrown around like rice at a wedding.”!
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You rock!!
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Thanks Michele for your poem, “Suspect”. And thanks for introducing me to “Glass: a Journal of Poetry”.
I’m in Montreal and keen on following up on your insights.
Carole Thorpe
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Thanks so much for reading, Carole! I love the work at Glass and was very honored to be published there.
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