"White Fragility," by Robin DiAngelo

A link to an article about White insulation in the USA:

http://libjournal.uncg.edu/index.php/ijcp/article/view/249/116

"The Long Haul," Hans Ostrom

Black truck hauling a white load.
Black train freighting a line of white boxcars.
Black barge moving heaps of beige garbage.
Black man holding up the weight of a white man killing him.

Getting on with it.
Carrying the carrying.
The white loads stay heavy, press down.
Inert weight, the freight is thought-free,
obtuse as iron and bereft of irony.

Where the black highway runs into blue water,
the black truck will dump its load at last
and roll lightly up the coast.

When the black train reaches the dusty depot,
it will wail like a monstrous saxophone,
then cut loose all those white cars, goodbye.

And after the black barge negotiates treachery
and sidles up to a wharf,
it will wait for a crane to take away
the accumulation
and then it will rise in the water.

Black notes behind bars
carry beat and tune
across white pages.

And the black notes, lifting from white charts,
shall swarm in air and, hitting white stones
hard and sweetly with the sound,
will turn them into beach sand.

White surrenders, exhausted from being White.
The White Queen and King had grown weary
of a polluted game. A humility blossoms
like an apple orchard. Milk is poured out
on black loamy soil. Comes the sound of weeping.



hans ostrom 2014

How White Operates, Too Often

Way too often, White
goes out like a boomerang
toward what is right
and fair and just, only
to turn in reactionary air

and curve home, home,
to righteous hate, selective
outrage, a change of "heart,"
smug safety, reunion with
old friends, and other amenities
of the supremacists' field
from which
the boomerang
was launched.

Whether you're Black
or White or something else,
here's the thing: if
you truly "get it,"

then you will know
what "it" is, and
you'll nod at
the tautology
(for sure),

and so,
you know,

no doubt
gratuitously,
I advise:

Beware of the White
radical, the White liberal,
the White conservative, and
it goes without saying
the White unapologetic bigot
spewing hate like a spigot.

Beware of them all. Be
unsurprised if they turn
back, if they curve a return to
"home," if, in fact,
they simply are not able.

For they are simple and White,
terrifyingly simple,
and they live
in a White-rewarding world,
and in most cases,
over the long haul,
they are not able.
They just aren't able.


hans ostrom 2013

My White Body

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My White Body

My white body has brought me ease
in this USA society that's marked black
and brown bodies, that marks them still.

My body white and masculine has functioned
as a passport, yes it has. Has often let me
be as invisible or as noticed as I prefer.

Has allowed me to prefer. I hear the voices
of contrarians: Have my white body and I
been excluded, ignored, worked hard, and


maybe even hated?  Oh, sure. But not so
as to make my white body's experience
and me equivalent to that of those marked

by this USA society. I've been reading
The Slave Ship: A Human History by
Marcus Rediker, 2008. You know, you

think you know, but you don't know--
that is why history is written, read.
Admit it. Admit you have a white body

according to the culture's rules, I told
myself. And let's not whitewash the issue.
This isn't Tom Sawyer's fence.

What's an admission worth? Not much.
It's a move, a mental shift. What must ensue
after the admission must be more productive

than just the admission. Otherwise the move
becomes just more hoo-hah from a mind inside
a white body. My white body has brought me ease.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom