For a poetry reading some weeks ago someone read the poem “Black Privilege” by Crystal Valentine. This poem examines some of the things black people have been forced to do over time and calling it “black privilege” as a mockery of non-black people who claim such thing exists.
In the poem she says “Black privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you.” She says not even God will look like you. Not that he just happens to not look like you, but that he won’t. It shows that to be black is so undesirable that not even God, who is said to have created people in his image, would be willing to look like you. And while this is a perfectly legitimate thing for a black woman to say who has spent all of her life being told that black isn’t beautiful, that black isn’t right. For her to express frustration in the fact that people say over and over again that white is holy and black isn’t is totally reasonable and justified. But what does it mean for a person who isn’t black to read this poem and talk about these things to a room full of a majority non-black people?
What does it mean when the author of the poem writes “And it’s tirin’, you know? For everything about my skin to be a metaphor, for everything Black to be pun intended, to be death intended,” and then we sit for the rest of the fifteen minutes trying to make metaphors from her blackness and trying to find death in her words?
What does it mean for her to say “Black privilege is having to have the same sense of humor as Jesus. Remember how he smiled on the cross? The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet,” as we go on and find humor in Invisible Man and find jokes in the poems we read?
How is it fair for us to take her experience and her suffering and pick it apart to search for enough symbolism to satisfy us? How is it fair to call someone a pale poet if we aren’t satisfied?
