It may feel as if recently we’ve fallen into dark times and there isn’t much reason for “singing.” Over the past few years, folks of mild to moderate socio-economic privilege seem to have become more concerned with the consistent ways the US is disappointing, oppressive, dangerous, and deadly for marginalized communities. Still, most of our response and social justice activism has been performative and lackluster, with public solidarity in joining inefficient protests, posting our allegiances on social media, or plastering our bumpers with virtue-signaling stickers, while lived reality for marginalized groups involves anything from the inability to socially participate as their authentic selves, to death.

In 2025, our newest white privilege identity crisis hinges on public outrage over the price of eggs. White people, we’re losing sight of the point! “Liberty and justice for all” has never been the truth of this nation. On the precipice of oligarchy, white folks are finally scared that our comfort-zone status is under threat, scared that the illusion of an economic middle-class is being erased. Meanwhile, the process of erasing identities and lives in marginalized communities is how this nation was built. The following collections are just a small reminder that our current political climate has been a long time in the making and life in the US has always provided minority writers with opportunities for “singing about the dark times.”

Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

(Graywolf Press, 2020)

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Just Us is first and foremost a valuable contemporary study in social anthropology. What stunned me the most throughout this collection of essays and poems is the speaker’s consistently rational and reasonable response to people and situations ranging from offensive to outrageously inappropriate in various degrees. This is a book steadfast in its purpose of starting and maintaining a conversation on American whiteness and privilege. In an interaction with a father who blames his son’s failure to get early admission to Yale on not being able to use “the diversity card,” Rankine actively engages in an empathy exercise for the sake of the conversation: “Don’t think. I reminded myself. Know what it is to parent. Know what it is to love. Know what it is to be white.” While this act of kindness is deliberate and deeply personal on the speaker’s part, this book goes on to expose, over and over, the ways in which white people lack the practice of empathy on a racial basis, as well as the knowledge and basic tools to even begin that practice. “I ask a white friend about white people speaking among themselves about their racism. It doesn’t happen.” In spite of documented, undeniable facts openly showing this nation’s institutionalized racism, white privilege refuses to see the need for change, as long as it can hold on to the word “privilege,” the last petty illusion of power the lower white class can wield when they don’t have the financial means to feel truly empowered within the capitalist system.

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The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson

by Percival Everett

(Red Hen Press, 2018)

This collection is an experiment in concept, coming together as a manual of instructions for slave training and handling. The poems are written in the voice of slave-owner Col. Hap Thompson and range from detailing desirable physical attributes in a slave to instructions on how to dehumanize said slave, from lashings, to near-drownings, and walking them on a leash. The language is educated, the vocabulary efficiency-driven, the tone technical and matter-of-fact. The poems are grotesque in their starkness and frightening in their veracity illustrating the historically accurate disregard for the humanity of a slave.

Though self-proclaimed “mock historical document,” the entirety of this collection is alarmingly plausible. These pieces are impossible to read without a certain degree of dissociation, as the feelings they stir up in the reader are not only uncomfortable, but immediate and absolutely necessary. This collection is crucial to understanding the kind of white privilege enjoyed by the American ruling class by putting the spotlight on the exact kind of values and acts of cruelty this American land was colonized with.

Owning My Masters

by AD Carson

(University of Michigan Press, 2024)

Only recently mastered and transcribed, this 34-track rap collection was Carson’s dissertation for the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Ph.D. program at Clemson University in 2017. At the crossroads of music and poetry, this album embodies the importance of art as a tool in historical record-keeping. While the mainstream success of rap music over the years has been assumed by groups uninvolved in the creation of the genre, the birth of rap and hip-hop music is inextricably tied to the artistic expression of life in African American, Afro-Caribbean and Latino inner-city communities in the 60’s and 70’s. Carson’s work appreciates the value of the lyric as historical record, making deliberate spoken-word choices for every track that become not only poetry, but also straightforward statements of political truth. The lyrics are both a record of and in response to public movements following deadly assaults against Black people by police and vigilantes around 2016. Carson’s work is an example of art as activism, exploring the ways in which America is far from the woke nation is pretends to be, as the institutions it relies on to function have been built on a history of racism.

“Oh, I wish I was in the Land of Freedom,
where the cops had jobs, but we really didn’t need ʼem.

[…]

The United States that I was born in.
Everybody but the Indians were foreign.”

“Just in Case” by A.D. Carson, from the album “I Used to Love to Dream,” 2020

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Bluff

by Danez Smith

(Graywolf Press, 2024)

The voice in these poems is that of a speaker at war with themselves. The collection grapples with the struggles to exist within a capitalist system on the background of racial tension, from the perspective of the racially marginalized minority speaker. It exposes the colonialist American Dream and its lack of concern for the mental health of those living with system-created generational trauma. It questions freedom as a function of productivity, and the perceived value of a human being between their own attempt to define self-worth and the institutionalized ways society defines worth.

Smith plays with form in an attempt to dislodge the poetic psyche from the numbness brought about by the normalization of violence against Black people. The hybrid visual poems have a surreal, dream state tone, while the traditional pieces seem rooted in waking-life hopelessness. Although not immediately apparent, this collection deals with the way the news and socio-political environments in general shape mental health struggles differently based on race, for men in particular. While Black men are forced to navigate life trying to avoid being profiled as the “angry Black man,” white men acting violently on their anger get “diagnosed” in the media.

“i’ve never been more afraid

of a white man’s loneliness.

in my dreams all the (Black) folks

turn to ants & America is a toddler

stomping us out ­– […]“

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Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

by John Murillo

(Four Way Books, 2016)

Violence, hostility, and rage. Murillo is relentless in holding the reader’s eyes open to the systemic dehumanization of minority groups by normalizing acts of deadly violence against their members. While this message isn’t new, Murillo’s twist is that he calls out the failure of peaceful protest and the way it becomes complicit in acts of systemic racism by becoming a widely publicized, repeated act of failure. The heart of this collection beats around a series of 15 sonnets titled “A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATHS, BY FIRE, OF THREE MEN IN BROOKLYN.” In this section, vulnerability and rage bleed together, as Murillo exposes the performative outrage of public protests and their inability to enact true social change as long as they’re being performed within the imposed limitations of the law. Police-supervised public protests in the wake of deadly police brutality become complicit in the normalization of said brutality. The polite civic exercise of protest is nothing more than

“To preach forgiveness in a burning church.

to nevermind the noose. To nurse one cheek

Then turn the next. To run and fetch the switch.”

The rage in these sonnets is palpable and only contained by poetic form. The message vibrates with a call to action, using poetry as pamphlet in the revolutionary act.

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This is How the Bone Sings

by W. Todd Kaneko

(Black Lawrence Press, 2020)

Kaneko’s poetry explores the legacy of trauma America bestowed on his family through his grandparents’ internment in the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho during WWII. For the speaker, the purpose of this exploration is to keep the bridge of family history alive across the generations of men spanning between speaker’s grandfather and his young son. The poetry here is relentlessly dark, but nonetheless lyrical as the speaker uses each poem to figure out what information he needs to preserve and pass down to his son, and how to do it. Though not immediately tense, written from old family scars rather than fresh wounds, Kaneko’s poems are still political as they hold up a mirror to the gratuitous violence America inflicted on Japanese people and other ethnic minorities living in the US during the war. There is no outright rage, only the resigned exhaustion of living with the ghosts of the damage. This collection lives at the crossroads of dream state and the present moment as the speaker records both history and his feelings towards that history, as an illustration of how far racism and systemic oppression stretch across generations.

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