Whiteness Blinds: A Ballad

Whiteness Blinds
By Patrick J. Derilus

Whiteness blinds, Whiteness blinds your
eyes from Truth indeed; your White skin and
colonized minds sheath you from your colorblind
racist verbiage; you insist Black-on-Black crime

exists, yet you refuse to believe you are a racist.
you’d utter, “you speak eloquently for a Black
person” and “you can be successful in
AmeriKKKa if you work hard enough.”

contrarily, that Whiteness of yours
shields the willful intent of your actions
like a White police officer’s violent insistence
to pursue our Black children who “resist” arrest,

who flee through the streets of Newark like
ten-year-old Legend Preston; a fifteen-year-old Black girl
in Maryland who fell off her bike, was pepper sprayed
by police, shoved in their car, echoing Eric Garner’s last elegiac cry.

Whiteness blinds, Whiteness blinds your
eyes from Truth indeed; our Black children are young
yet Whiteness functions to perceive them old, such
as the gory story of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till; Carolyn Bryant,

aged eighty-three, recently voiced an untruth untold.
Whiteness blinds, Whiteness has long thrived on deception.
how long will it take for you to realize that you have
contorted our Black children’s perceptions?