Patricia Asuncion’s most recent poem to appear here was “Charlottesville says no to hate!” (December 2017)

United States Wite-Out of Non-Whites
By Patricia Asuncion

Our history by white male scribes
wites-out non-whites
from Might or Right, left
with white charity.

Revolutionary whites criticized
the Crown’s slavery, but
the Founding Fathers made white fortunes and mixed-white
families from slaves,
lest we forget Sally, a slave, not a mistress, to white Jefferson.
In every war since our birth, non-whites
have served under whites, their efforts
redacted from white-paged memory.

White rights have been emphasized and legitimized
in our legal pages, from Jim Crow’s whites-only toilets, white
Social Security slighting non-white farm and domestic workers,
the Wagner Act’s white-only unions
to 60s Civil Rights cases still a fight today—
always one technicality, one exception, one interpretation
from unified white and non-white rights.

No surprise long-time white favoritism keeps today’s
top hires for white men, white assets
ten times more than non-whites.

The lop-sided, white-sided, male-justified-guided spin
brings to light
a blight not of nature but of bias.