This Lucky White Girl

I have been so inspired by the wonderful Layla Saad @wildmysticwoman and her call to spiritual white women to comprehend and process their white privilege. This poem arose as a result. I intend to film it, because I feel it needs saying and seeing. But for now...



This Lucky White Girl
By Alice B Grist
 
A white girl
So very lucky
This lucky white girl
 
Not seeing
suffering
in the detritus of
my privilege.
 
This lucky white girl.
 
Oblivious
 
In the fat realms
of protection.
My factor 50
Struggle blocked life
 
It’s so easy for me,
not so real,
to speak of equality
when I am equality.
 
So I slapped that
white, white boy
who said he
‘hated fucking black ni**ers’
 
And I moved on
Proud in my play
But…
A little scared.
He wanted to kill me.
Punched the fence.
Stalked my imagination
with his revenge.
 
I know
the fear of
white men.
 
Heart full of love
but so little action.
Studying your suffering
at school.
Sobbing into set texts,
Then out for drinks.
to forget,
far too easily
 
This lucky white girl
Enamored
and lost in
your other
your pain
your history
your wisdom
your risings.
Free to turn the page.
 
Letting it go
becoming blonder
more iconically white.
But always
tipping my hat
to the feminists
and suffragettes
Who reeled me and mine
out of the maternal dark
 
Being a Woman
With tits and bits
Is enough to weaken
anyone’s resolve
kill belief
cause a pain.
Enough to shutter up
and to silence
 
(My mother
was gay.
My father
a witch.
In the 1980’s…
But
second hand
discrimination
Is not a defense
I should play)
Not here.
 
My white skinned privilege
cannot stop with my daughters.
For the equality that
trips from my lips
is creating a place
where I stumble
 
Not my present
not my gift to give
a hand holding
reality busting
leg up to say…
 
I got you
I got you
I am here
I see you
I need you
I love you
 
For what I can give you
Pales, pales, pales
in it’s easy, easy, easy
wisdoms.
 
To your wisdoms
so unheard
held down
turned around
shut up and shot.
Are the gifts this
dire world needs.
 
For it is pain
that launches
forward the
Revolution
our Evolution
 
So I may be a stepping stone
 
I will be
this white girl,
this lucky white girl
your stepping-stone
 
I won’t lament
your suffering
that my slave holding
family caused…
 
Maybe I should have
mentioned that
before…
 
Fleshy ancestral demons.
In denial
So easy to dismiss
To disregard
Shhhh…..
The whispered
quiet confessions of
mother to daughter
are not always
dripping in magic.
Or love.
 
So.
In heart
in action
and in voice
I will say,
 
I am responsible
In every lucky white girl ignorance.
 
I am sorry.
 
Is that enough?
 
I am sorry.
 
Is that enough?
 
I am sorry.
 
Is that enough?
 
I know it is not enough.
 
So I resolve to grow
as I learn to hold
space for all of us
offering my lucky white girl
passion
as a door of sorts
a leg up
past my privilege
that imprisons us both
to something more
 
More that I can imagine
so enraptured
Lucky white girl
in the status quo
beholden and betrothed.
 
In leaving that
and lifting you…
So that you, me, we
might enrich
this parody
this patriarchy
(That should no longer be)
With all of our ‘other’
 
So that we may be lucky together
and rain down
with a spectrum.
A rainbow.
Of what might be.
 
Your daughters
becoming
as lucky
as me.
 
Alice B Grist

​As inspired by Layla Saad's letter HERE...

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