Thursday, October 06, 2016

MY COLOR

by Eaton Jackson


“Implicit bias is the mind’s way of making uncontrolled and automatic associations between two concepts very quickly. In many forms, implicit bias is a healthy human adaptation — it’s among the mental tools that help you mindlessly navigate your commute each morning. It crops up in contexts far beyond policing and race (if you make the rote assumption that fruit stands have fresher produce, that’s implicit bias). But the same process can also take the form of unconsciously associating certain identities, like African-American, with undesirable attributes, like violence.” —Emily Badger, The New York Times,  October 5, 2016. Photo: Late last month in El Cajon, Calif., demonstrators protested the fatal shooting of a black man by a police officer. Credit Gregory Bull/Associated Press via The New York Times


my color
forces you to
close your eyes in fear and squeeze the  trigger
one  two  three  four  five  six times
until my color falls to the ground  until
my color jerks spasmodically no more
one  two  three more salvos into
the inanimate object of my color to make sure
that my color is dead
explosions that
the kids playing ball in the park dismissed as firecrackers
until the shooter’s chest heaves no more with primal fear
Until the frozen aim thaws
lowers slowly its nozzle
at the ground where
the six footer
threat to your life
is now  prostrate at a skewed angled lifeless colorless
unseeing, open-eyed stare at your partners
also gun-drawn
applying CPR.
RIOTING THROUGH THE NIGHT

primordial anger as combustible as the overturned car
seething like molten asphalt       running people
running    people  running stumbling falling stumbling back up
towards a recently renovated convenience store
towards the innocent, pretty store

running   running  right  through shuttered  windows
busted open  by thrown missiles        running    running  
and  more  town-folks   and more homies  join in
ripping at the innards of the  convenience store
whose high visibility quotient      no fault of its own

but merely a child of town’s  exaggerated soaring architecture
no fault of its own,
now raped of everything inside
defiled virgin in tatters among the smoldering ruins    
and the riot runs on

the burning building  breaks into half
falling
into its own leaping inferno.


Eaton Jackson is an aspiring Jamaican writer. He has been a permanent green card resident in the United States for the past four years. Writing has been an attempt at fulfilling an artistic yearning and a source of therapy for him, when life’s aches, pains and depressions rain down.