This is what Sonia Sanchez, our superstar of poetry, wrote for her bibliography for Orde Coombs, his book, We Speak as Liberators: Young Black Poets—An Anthology back in 1970:

“blk/woman/mother/poet/teacher/barely surviving in wite/assed/amurica.”

As you can see, she stays in character. Decades later, here in this electronic information age, her energy produces a racial compression algorithm that is a super-cool hack of the style of e.e. cummings.

You may wonder why there are not more “big-name” poets here in the kinté space. Well, we want to add to the Internet presence of African and indigenous voices—we do not want to be redundant. This classic Sonia Sanchez poem, “right on: white america,” is a wonderful opportunity to contribute to the wired world.

Credits

Written by . . . . . . . Sonia Sanchez
Archival Research by . . . . . . . Tasha Dionne Thomas
XHTML/CSS Programming by . . . . . . . Bryan Wilhite