[Savage Minds is pleased to publish this ethno-poem by L. Kaifa Roland who is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Kaifa is the author of Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha: An Ethnography of Racial Meaning (OUP, 2010) “T/racing Belonging in Cuban Tourism” (Cultural Anthropology, August 2013), and “Between Belonging and the F/Act of Niggerisation” in Trayvon Martin, Race, and American Justice: Writing Wrong (Sense Publishers, 2014). Currently, she is doing ethnographic research with Black women entrepreneurs in Havana.]
I will not call her name
There are other names to be called
In this prematurely labeled epoch of post-racial America
Our children lay dead in the streets
At the hands of authority figures who see their color
and gender as a threat
Shoot to kill not to stop or inquire
Call their names.
Like Emmett Till before them,
young black men keep falling:
From Amadou Diallou
to Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant
and Sean Bell and Eric Garner,
Tamir Rice and Michael Brown
and on and on it seems… Continue reading