Four faces, one mind.
A single distinction you could find
under that firm handshake,
the eye contact and confident smile.

It’s pigments and melanin;
shapes and hues to the blurry eye
if you scrub away the preconceived notion
burned into the common American child
that renders them indifferent
to the dense cultures, deeply hewn lines,
the only things richer
than a person’s caramel outside.

I’m not saying it hasn’t ameliorated;
at least skin color is not a crime.
But it’d be insulting, contemptuous, insolent
to fail to bring certain things to light.

It may seem to some
society is erasing the lines
segregating those people called black
and those people called white.
But when the police officers we hire
see a dark man with his hood drawn tight
our jurisdiction says it’s all right
for them to shoot on sight.

A cashier nods to a woman in line,
an Indian mother, you couldn’t deny.
“What, no curry?” he chuckles, he cries
as he bags the poultry
for fried chicken night
The young man couldn’t help but stereotype
when as a little boy at dinnertime
Father would rant on and on
about those “cocoa puffs”
and what every single one of them
seemed to be like.

And just because it’s been a while
since there have been internment camps
doesn’t mean an impulsive tongue stays mild
and contains itself when it’s not content.
Because when a girl hears
Mother shout out of her car’s left side
“I swear to god, that bloody Asian
doesn’t even know how to drive!”
She might as well go tell her friends
to fear for their lives
because their Korean bus driver
might not see the stop signs.

It’ll take many generations
for a person to take pride
that instinctive discrimination
is no longer an American vice.
It’ll take more than a reckoning
with an unseen divine
to discard a reputation
of condemn, conform, confine.
The only thing that will break loose
the shackles we ourselves have tied
is when every color on the spectrum
is as patriotic as red, blue, and white.