GHETTO
IN THE GHETTO
Why make it plain as day Mr. Curator? Louis Jacob
/OUTSIDERS A.G.O. asks us: Do you recognize yourselves
in the monkey’s otherness? He tells us: dividing lines
conjoin what they separate A Jazz riff plays somewhere
down the hall A white woman +a negro man hold a chimp
in NYC it is 1967
Gary Winograd the artist tells us: the monkey is the product of
miscegenation The woman beside me says: a bit too long for
scrabble Dividing lines have never conjoined slave +master only
rape aka misegenationdegredation also too long for scrabble
This week the old white Jew who is running for President said:
White people don’t live in the ghetto A word politically corrected
into oblivion He was instantly excoriated And though his language
is dated the word ghetto as in Warsaw Ghetto never went away Jews
by the 100,000’s murdered there 1942
If a word grows up out of the dung heap of racism why not keep it there?
Who is allowed to use the N word Kyke Ghetto? Relics of a time when
schools were segregated +washrooms at Toronto’s beaches had signs:
No dogs Negros or Jews
What word would you choose to describe the huge tracts of tenement blocks
in every American city where a disproportionate number of African Americans
live? The Projects? Whitewashing the truth You cannot take the word Ghetto
out of the Ghetto Why not call a spade a spade? Who you saying lives in fear?
__
What I want
What I am
What you force me to be
Is what you are
(Gordon Parks 1st African American Photographer
Life Magazine 1967)
Gary Winograd American Photographer 1928-1984
Spring 2016
songanddancegirl 
The King would have approved of this one!