'Colored' - Bill Greenwood

[Larry Robinson]

'Colored’ 

The Spanish cognate ‘colorado’ 
looks like it means ‘colored’ 
but in reality means ‘red’ 
and triggers images of love, 
perhaps, maybe of blood. 
Applied to the skin this color
used to mean, ‘an Indian’, 
another racist designation that  
has fallen out of use which now 
means ‘a person born in India’. 
 
Native Americans did in fact 
come here from Asia, an origin
that until recently could get 
them classified as ‘yellow peril’,
understood to be referring 
to ‘people from the Far East’,
actually, from here, far West.
 
Some original indigenous 
tribes migrated farther south 
into the world we know 
as Latin America, although 
the language this implies 
is not what’s spoken there 
by the inhabitants called ‘brown’
—by some, ‘the noble race’—
indeed, ‘people of the earth’.
 
Tellingly, however, none 
of these groups self-identify 
by the colors Europeans  
from the other side of Iceland
painted them.
                       Consider how
our forefathers flee hunger, 
persecution, write treatises 
and speak sin-cere-ly about 
freedom…then found it on 
white privilege…whereupon 
the shackling roots of slavery 
reach deeper into every mind.
 
In my lifetime ‘black’ people 
worked hard to counter many 
‘evil’ connotations of their color 
and they affirmed it’s ‘beautiful’. 
Alas. It keeps on meaning, 
‘I   can’t   breathe.’
 
But finally today,   we   are   bearing   
witness   to   a   moment   that   our   newly      
great   George   Floyd   has   given   us
 
when Martin Luther King’s content 
of character stands forth from its granite 
as if quickening his Dream of Promise   
so I say here and now to you that
 
I believe we will get there 
 
to where the knee of justice 
 
on the neck of brutality  
 
breaks the back of racism 
 
with liberty once and for all
 
thus together let us get to work.

	- Bill Greenwood
 

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