Paper Crowns
Paper Crowns
By Joanne Diaz
after the New York Times newsfeed from the week of May 6-11, 2018
This week in which faculty members at the University of Florida
shove black graduates offstage for dancing in honor
of what is regularly denied them; in which Nordstrom Rack
apologizes to black teenagers falsely accused of shoplifting;
in which a woman says she saw burglars break and enter
into a home when in fact they were black Airbnb guests;
in which two Native American brothers are pulled
from a campus tour after nervous parents call police;
in which two black men settle with Starbucks and the city
of Philadelphia over the absurdity of their unnecessary arrest;
in which two black women are told to golf faster
and then the club calls the police; in this week, yes,
the white mother at a kindergarten celebration
might think that certain gestures will be seen
as kindnesses, especially here, in flyover country,
this place of no consequence, surely forgettable,
every lonely day an erasure, yes, especially
on this special day with homemade muffins,
paper flowers, paper crowns decorated by the children,
a coronation as we walk through the door; yes,
certainly it has to be kindness for the white mother
to see the black child, the beautiful long braids,
the shine of the girl’s hair at her temples,
the rainbow barrettes and the vibrant ribbons
fastened neatly at the ends, and want to touch the hair.
Surely she imagines that it is right, an honor, to take
one braid in each hand and not ask, but declare,
I just have to feel your hair. I do not look,
only imagine what I am not seeing: one long braid
in each hand, the woman pulling down slowly,
the lingering of her hands, her open gaze, this white
wanting, which is offered as an act of beholding
but is all blindness and much worse, and the black mother,
what does she do then, seated only two feet away
and at a child’s table, what is there to do but look up
to admire these paper crowns that the children have made
for each of us, queens for the day, plastic gems pasted
onto each horn meant to resemble the rays of the sun.
[Joanne Diaz is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is the author of My Favorite Tyrants (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press, 2011), and with Ian Morris, she is the coeditor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She is an Associate Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.]