Red.
Redhead.
Ginger.
Carrot top.
Firecracker.
Fire crotch.
Fiery. Temperamental. Too much.
Red.
Red, pale and blue.
Pale.
Pale, a hue of pigment.
White, a color.
Whiteness, a trance.
A trance of false comfort at others' expense.
A script of who gets centered.
Who gets stopped.
Who gets believed.
Who gets to move first.
Who gets to forget there was ever a ritual at all.
Whiteness, a possession.
A betrayal of lineage.
Discerning between pale skin and whiteness is an assignment.
An assignment of relinquishment.
An assignment of soul.
An assignment of becoming fully ensouled.
In iterations.
With witnesses to your lost false innocence!
Race traitor becomes a traitor to all pretense and entrapment.
Class traitor, gender traitor. Amen!
An expensive release.
Liberation doesn't come cheaply.
As you embody the dismantling,
you embody the threat.
Cost and consequence!
Threatening the identities many faintly realize they're serving.
An assignment to reassert your intelligence and your allegiance to your humanness.
Have heart! There are many off-ramps to whiteness, on-ramps to growing up.
Blue is one.
Red, pale and blue.
Blue.
Blue,
the grief that finally tells the truth.
Blue,
the bruise of being othered.
Blue,
family and systemic violence.
Ouch.
Blue,
homesickness for songs never learned.
Languages buried.
Ancestors synthesized.
Blue,
the throat tight from swallowing generations of silence.
Blue,
seeing and feeling clearly enough to leave the cult of American whiteness.
Oof.
Have you felt it?
What's been lost?
What was done to you, what you've done to others, too?
Disability, an off-ramp.
The body refusing the terms of empire.
Slow down for a wider realization of ability.
Gender, an off-ramp.
To become weird to the world that made you.
Every off-ramp, an interruption to the interruption.
We're at the end.
Which means a return to the beginning.
A fool proceeds.
Back to Red.
Museified, fetishized, feared, and condemned.
Sounds to me like the eroticization of assumption, the body turned into story without consent!
I reclaim Red.
Red
as in provocateur.
Red
as the rust on the machinery of supremacy.
Red
as rowan berries in Irish hedgerows.
Red
as fox fur sprinting steadfast across fall fields.
Red as in alert.
Red as in mutation.
Mutation away from the inherited patterns of white as in whiteness.
And toward the possibility of a multiracial democracy.
Red, pale and blue on this land.
I bow to what and who happened for me to exist here.