"Sam Town" - by Sharon Flood Kasenberg

Alexandria, Louisiana - 1985:

This is the part of town we hurry by -
past social engineering gone awry.
A neighbourhood that politicians built
in probable attempt to assuage guilt.
(As if the rows of houses all the same
could somehow undo decades built on shame.)
These little houses have morphed into shacks,
offset at times by shiny Cadillacs.
Where white paint covered sins of bygone time,
now weathered walls are grey with grit and grime.
These sagging hovels stretch for blocks and blocks,
and through these stagnant streets nobody walks.
Not here to comfort were concessions made -
no stately oaks are seen providing shade.
And hot behind the windows boarded up,
another generation sits to sup
while I, in air conditioned car, whizz past -
and say a prayer I don't run out of gas.

Sharon Flood Kasenberg, July 5, 2010

Black lives matter. There - I've said it. And by saying it I have in no way implied that any other lives don't matter.

I have no special qualifications to be a spokesperson for this particular movement. I'm fair skinned, green-eyed and blonde. I am friends with only a handful of people who are black. But I'm writing this post because I came across this poem - a memory written in rhyme.

When I was almost 23, I spent 18 months living in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. Life in the south was culture shock for a girl born and raised in Northern Ontario. I had seen "Roots" and read several books about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, but had somehow come to the conclusion that "all of that race division stuff" was far in the shameful past. I had even been warned before I left that the "racial issues" in the southern states would offend my finely honed sense of justice, but still I was unprepared for the blatant racism I witnessed.

I was living in Shreveport, LA when I saw my first "Projects" - cinder block buildings that seemed to go on for miles, and little wooden houses in appalling shape (for the most part), that likewise filled whole neighbourhoods. As a female voluntarily proselytizing for the church I belonged to, I was warned to steer clear of these areas.

So I did.

Later, while living in Alexandria, LA, the apartment I lived in was in a mostly black neighbourhood that bordered on "Sam Town". (Seriously - that's how it was marked on the map.) Curiosity finally made us drive through the area, and I was appalled by what I saw.

A lot of the houses had no glass in the windows, and a few had blankets hanging where doors should have been. I was shocked that people could live in such horrible conditions. I felt a whole range of conflicting emotions as we drove through the area that day - outrage that humans could live in such impoverished conditions, sadness that those native to the area accepted this as the norm, fear - what if we ran out of gas or got lost there?

Three words kept running through my mind:

This isn't right.

Twenty-five years later, while looking at a picture I'd snapped of project housing in Shreveport, I sat down and wrote this poem. Twenty-five years of additional experience had added to the racist experiences I'd had in the south. Now I had new emotions to add into the mix as I looked at that sad little hovel in a blurry picture - shame and despair. What gave me the right to live so much more comfortably than that? What was wrong with the world? How could parts of the world still live that way? How could parts of North America still live that way? Why hasn't more been done to equalize opportunities?

Six years have passed since I wrote the poem. I've watched video now of southern police officers, not too far from where I lived, shoot an unarmed black man in the back. I've read stories written by educated, gainfully employed black men who are being harassed, even here in Canada!

This isn't right!

All lives matter. If you're in possession of a conscience at all you know this. But right now we need to acknowledge that black lives matter. We need to stop living so comfortably in our pale skin, and start seeing that people around us are mistreated far too often just because they have darker complexions than we do. These people don't really expect us to understand what they go through. They're smart enough to know we can't. All they want is some acknowledgment. I've seen enough, read enough and heard enough to give it to them.

Black Lives Matter.