On Privilege

an exercise in narcissism

Growing up, the adults always said,

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Hi there! My name is Anthony and I’m part of the problem.

white, straight, male, 

born into wealth, clean bill of health, blessed with only occasional thoughts of suicide, raised with white jesus on my side, underweight, bills prepaid to sit in large lecture rooms where nobel laureates doodled dicks on all the desks. 

I inherited high ground, 

I was gifted a glass tower, and the people looked so small down there, like ants.

like flowers with petals different from mine.

so small that they couldn’t hear me wiring barbed words when the clouds were at my armpits.

It was embarrassingly recently that I realized 

They weren’t small and they could hear me. 

They weren’t small I was just born with convex lenses glued to my eyes that I’ve made no motion to remove. 

Disks of glass bloated at their centers by centuries of moral atrophy; I distort them further by sitting still.

Superglued there, I enjoy the reversed binoculars of privilege, bird-watching badly on a full stomach from my throne of couch and comfort.

I am not an active part of the problem, I tell myself.

I am not an active part, but when the problem is inaction, where does that leave me?

It leaves me loose-lipped and large, ducking hard questions and killing with apathy.

It leaves me masturbating on a mountain peak my lineage climbed using ladder rungs of broken spines.

This isn’t a poem about guilt, but that doesn’t mean I’m not growing some.

And in case you were wondering, I’ve never raped anyone.

But I’m also a virgin, and I’m scared of the urges sprouted in my skull, these shoots of lust like porcupine quills tattooing sex on my brain, reaching out and undressing my fantasies.

When I was young, mom gave me cinnamon toast crunch when I wanted it and a nintendo wii when I wanted it and money for the movies when I wanted it and I’m scared of what might happen when I want a person and she’s fine with being separate human beings. Will it peel my spoiled baby skin, pasty and anemic? 

Men. Look at your skin. What’s below?

Muscles with memory. Mine are small but they know gestures. My hands raised to mother, her willing to give, fingers curled like smile hooks to catch free kisses,

Let me restrain and retrain my hands. 

I need to take a class in the basics, my muscles recall the gestures of an angry baby with fistfuls of feathers.

And will this fever ever break?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I only know I’m scared.

I only know that this is a totally okay thing to be scared of.

I only know that I get to go to parties without covering my cup,

and I get to have opinions on everything.

I know that by existing as I do, I am a statue, an oppressor in granite, the nonvocal majority

sleeping on a pillow, a dead soldier of terra cotta, whiny scolder of systems, greeter of the police, blissfully oblivious, and all the while I channel Walt Whitman and I speak for everyone. 

I hear America singing, but it is through a cup-string phone and it might be a telemarketer.

My mouth is not the mouth of everyone.

My mouth is my own and it chokes on important answers like gristle.

My tongue is dry and honeycombed, watch me rub it against my body.

Watch me lick my brain in self-love until it vanishes.

Watch me recede into a mural of faces that look like my own in the mirror,

that are my own in the mirror, as silent as reflections and full of dried paint.

NO.

please let that not be me. 

please let that not be me. 

Watch me unwrap the mummified morality, gauze sticking to scabs of prejudice, ripping them off to bleed love as best I can.

I will never know the loving touch of a man under soft sheets

or the fist contact in an alleyway for loving who I choose,

I will never know the judgment of a stranger on hard streets, 

I will never feel the dissection of my attributes on a lab tray of f**k dreams,

I will never feel that the skin I inhabit was a leasing mistake,

but I will move my limbs and mouth. I will become salt and dissolve into solutions to problems, I’ll be drawn by the human gravity, form into planets of plans for a future in a different solar system. 

And I am unwrapping the mummy, it is resurrecting just like the dead kids on the streets can’t.

I am unspooling, so please use my body's threads to sew a protest shirt, please insert me, a gear into a growing machine, make something useful of the newly unraveled self I spent so long knitting beneath a rock in the sky.

Make something of me, allow me my words that reach too short and grasp nothing completely, forgive me for myself and myself only.

Reviews

[Sydney]

I can relate a lot to what you were saying in the beginning, about those superglued lenses. I also recently was overcome with guilt thinking of the privileges I have simply because of circumstance. It's difficult for me not to become burdened by it. I enjoyed reading this, thanks for sharing.

[TM]

Hey Anthony,

I found your poem very gripping and intense. I am going to assume that this poem i not merely a work of fiction, but has taken elements from your real life. If that is the case, this makes the poem even more powerful. Your candid, heart on your sleeve approach to expressing your feelings regarding privilege (or as many called it "White Privilege) falls into a category that is seldom read or heard. It comes from a place of pure honesty and bravery, without having the pretentiousness and high and mighty approach that other comments usually present. In a way you are offering yourself wholly in a slave like manner to be "used" and "inserted" into the machine that is acting as the vehicle against the capitalist mindset that exists throughout the world.

As a black man and as an African (living in Africa) I respect the points you are making as well as your viewpoint, especially in the tough times we are currently inhabiting. One needs to look no further that #BlackLivesMatter and, more locally to me, #RhodesMustFall to see the need for works of literature like yours.

I look forward to reading more of your work.

Regards
TMadzi

[Anthony J]

Thank you so much! You definitely arrived at my main point, and I'm really glad that you appreciated.