Hardly Cool Poem by gershon hepner

White women flip and flop their hair,
embarrassing black ones whose hair is curly,
while white men in the showers stare
at black men they consider to be surly.
The straightness of one’s hair can make
a person who has curly hair upset,
and showers cause men to mistake
the attitude of strangers who are wet.

What bothers others about you,
especially if you’re a difference race,
is often not the things you do
but just the fact you have a different face.
White and black may feel they’re quite
entitled to be prejudiced and foolish
and see the world as black and white,
but this is hardly cool, or even coolish.


Maureen Corrigan reviews Lena Williams’ “It’s the Little Things: The Everyday Interactions Under the Skin of Blacks and White” (Harcourt) (“The Perception of Race, Real or Not, ” the NYT, September 4,2000) . “White women go around flipping their long, straight manes in public, which annoys surrounding blacks, who are sensitive about their hair, while in the locker rooms across the land, white men cower in corners when black men undress.” The book is influenced by Deborah Tannen’s “You Just Don’t Understand, ” which ascribed misunderstandings between the sexes to different male and female linguistic styles. Corrigan disagrees with the book’s conclusions, citing Orlando Patterson’s observation that Afro-Americans are quintessentially American in their values and traditions and have as much intragroup heterogeneity as the many European-derived variations of white Americans.

9/5/00