Thanks for presenting us such well-written poem and fantastic artwork. Well done, boys! I am SO proud of you!!

Lovely post.

Sometimes young people notice important things which we, the so-called grow-ups, fail to see. Robin Lakoff in her The Language War draws on two interesting anecdotes belonging to the Law Professor Patricia Williams:

The first one in this:

At a faculty meeting once, I raised several issues: racism among my students, my difficulty in dealing with it myself, and my need for the support of colleagues. I was told by a white professor that “we” should be able to “break the anxiety by just laughing about it.” Another nodded in agreement and added that “the key is not to take this sort of thing too seriously.

The second one is this:

Williams’s young son is diagnosed by his nursery school teachers as “colorblind.” She has his eyesight tested by an ophthalmologist, who finds it normal. She investigates, and finds that the basis of the teachers’ diagnosis was that the boy resisted identifying color at all. So, when asked what color the grass was, he would reply, “It makes no difference.” Williams realized that the child was merely echoing his teachers’ platitudes about race which he, being black, had already grasped as well-meant falsehoods. Indeed, the kids in class “had been fighting about whether black people could play ‘good guys’.

Lakoff then writes:

“if you’re a member of the dominant group, your attributes are invisible, as your role in making things the way they are is not noticeable. This process is called “exnomination” by Roland Barthes. He discusses the bourgeoisie as an exnominated group: “As an ideological fact, [the bourgeoisie] completely disappears: the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation. It makes its status undergo a real ex-nominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named”

Exnominated groups become apolitical and nonideological. They just are. Their rules become the rules: “Practiced on a national scale, bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order”

According to Lakoff, the same claim can be made of white middleclass males in contemporary America. In fact, whites sometimes feel as if they have been exnominated into obliteration.

And here comes the problem, (or the Irony):

As a consequence, there are attempts at what might be called re-nomination: the formation of white studies departments at universities, male supremacy groups like the National Organization of Men, and racial supremacist groups like the National Association for the Advancement of White People. There is an irony here which can be summarized as: beware of your wishes, for you may get them.

Lakoff, R. The Language War. University of California Press (pp. 53-54)

Addo, the first time Vera showed your artwork a couple of years ago, it encouraged me to see that a boy your age has such a hopeful view of our country; it still does.

Vera, congratulations to you and Ben for raising such beautiful children!

What an excellect poetic and visual response to the disease of Racism. It certainly is a triumph over adversity. I like your thinking and your voice in the poem and artists’ work that compliments the poem. Very creative! Well done boys! I would like to hear from you.

Thanks Vera for sharing this piece of art. Coming it from boys of this age gives hope, nothing better than that. No doubt boys are credit to you.

Best wishes
Khan