Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Yellow bone, yellohammer, red bone...

Sometimes I get put into a situation I don't like. I think everyone does at some point in their lives. However, when I start to point out what I find as fallacies I think people get highly offended. Or they assume that I am making so much to do about nothing. Hey I get it.. but when situations happen where I am made to feel like I am less than. I must address it. Today I heard someone use the term yellow bone... now if you don't understand the term you can google it. I wont go into it, but I don't like the feeling I got from it.. so of course I had to write about it..

--
Yellow boned
a term so much like thick bread
it settles like a hard lump in my stomach
at once I can hear the jarring words...
"You will never understand.
You are not one of us.
You are half"
Cast aside for racial ambiguity
as if I am impure
unclean
as if the only way to be clean is to be one irrefutable thing
like I am a blob of black ink on white paper
it is black and white
it is black or white
choose
Like I could bathe in the flames and arise the color of ebony
or maybe dip in cold water and arise white as milk
Or maybe I can peel back my flesh and become red?
To be without one label is to be born in sin it seems...
and it is those who share the legacy of my own blood that would cast me away
half cast, like so much luggage
mulatto, like a bastardized blend of horse and mule
Yellow bone
like my bones and flesh did not develop inside my black mother
yellow bone
like my great grandfather did not develop in his red mother
yellow bone
like somehow, I am not a sister, a friend, a lover, a peer
I am an IT
and you ask me why I loath the word?
Why my insides clench and the wounds of the child I was crack open to bleed anew?
Maybe you can't understand because my bones are yellow..

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