Tag: institutionalized racism

The Sunday After

By DW McKinney

the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, we gather in the church sanctuary and sing the Black national anthem1. We mourn in unison. A week after the new president resumes his campaign of white (straight, male) supremacy, of “making America great,” of rolling back civil rights and liberties for marginalized people, we step backward in time with him. We borrow the strength of Buffalo Soldiers, Black infantrymen crooning the anthem as they fought on two fronts against fascists and discrimination in World War II. We borrow from our revolutionary leaders who belted the lyrics as they marched through segregated streets. We borrow from our greats and grands who sang for glory as they conducted sit-ins, and integrated schools, and lived and died and endured. Our lungs expel the words in the air around us, but we breathe them back into our souls again and again until our grief becomes a rallying cry.

DW McKinney is an award-winning writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 2024 TORCH Literary Arts Fellow, she is also the recipient of fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Ecotone, and TriQuarterly. She serves as nonfiction editor at Shenandoah.

Photo credit: Cover of the Hawthorn Books 1970 edition of Lift Every Voice and Sing.

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  1. James Weldon Johnson, civil rights activist and a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, originally wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a poem in 1900. It was later composed as a hymn, becoming a powerful refrain throughout the Civil Rights Movement. ↩︎

Target Practice

By Geoffrey Philp

After Jericho Brown

 

I ride around this city feeling as if I’m always a target,
like the one at a gun range where cops used mug shots
of African-American men to improve the shots
of their snipers—photos of black men who weren’t dead,
but whose images would be useful to kill the soon-to-be-dead,
on the way back from the library, a party or even a drag race.
For although I don’t trust the spokesperson who said that race
had nothing to do with the department’s choice of pictures,
I believe him when he said they would be adding pictures
from the database of suspects that they’ve arrested,
so when I’m pulled over, I know I’m going to be arrested.
I ride around this city feeling as if I’m always a target.

 

Born in Jamaica, Geoffrey Philp is the author of five books of poetry, two novels, two collections of short stories, and three children’s books. A recipient of the Luminary Award from the Consulate of Jamaica (2015) and a chair for the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, Philp’s work is featured on The Poetry Rail at The Betsy in an homage to twelve writers who shaped Miami culture. Through DNA testing, Philp recently discovered his Jewish ancestry and his poem, “Flying African,” has been accepted for publication in New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust. He is currently working on a collection of poems, Distant Cousins.

Image: North Miami Beach Police. Masking added to protect the victims.