Reports From The Field: White People Love Me Poem by Morgan Parker

Everything is connected. How I have gotten too comfortable. How being alone turns into loneliness. How performance is a habit. The growing difference between acceptance and love. The growing awareness of difference. The awareness of difference as barrier to love and success. Here is a stark fact I hate to break to my white friends: I can't have what you can have. Instead I have this strange dress I'm trying to zip myself into; this tricky way of moving through the world. Here's an uncomfortable fact about the level of trauma I've accumulated: sometimes I think I can't have what you can have means I can't have anything. Dear white friends, this isn't really working for me so much anymore. I'm not breaking up with you. I just need to find myself. Diversity isn't equality. Simply acknowledging privilege isn't equality. There is something more to want. I'm letting myself get uncomfortable with being alone. I'm spitting out the token. Watching it rust in the dirt.