A Spoken Word Poem on the Policing of Race and Citizenship

December 16, 2014 / Ela Barton

SB 1070, Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, created legislation that allowed for anti-LatinX racial profiling, xenophobia, and outright police violence.

In this spoken word poem, Ela Barton explores the motivation behind Arizona’s policy makers creating such a law and its citizens voting it into action. She suggests that the hateful sentiment is a response to people of color working for themselves and generating inter-community resources, as opposed to subordinately working for white people in positions of power.

These laws are a violent reclamation for hegemonic power, a form of legislative oppression, a continuation of colonization’s vicious legacy, and an effort to protect and sustain white privilege.

Video courtesy of Button Poetry. For more amazing spoken word performances, check them out on YouTube and Facebook.

Click for the Transcript

ELA BARTON: In Arizona, law enforcement are allowed to ask for proof of legal presence in the US if there is any reasonable suspicion.

Now tell me, what makes a human reasonably suspicious of not belonging to one of the world’s most ethnically diverse nations? What gives anyone the right to outline my features, sample my skin color, and call it illegal.

They call me an invader until I’m proven free, telling me because I’m brown, I need proper ID. Consider this my documentation: First generation American citizen, but my family has always worked for you.

Find our green cards sewn into your plantations. Find our papers built into your pineapples, your sugarcanes, your railroads, your cotton, your gold. Identify my race. Tell me where I come from before I even begin speaking, then tell me to go back there. Mark me an Eskimo, a Native American, or something mixed with Oriental like my uncle might have been a rug. Consider this my documentation.

You’ve cut my ancestors feet at the ankles to keep them from leaving.

Identify me as invisible until a crime is committed, then identify me as the criminal. Then tell me this is simply for my safety, then beat me. Then tell me I’m safe in Arizona while politicians pose for pictures with neo-Nazi leaders. Tell me it’s as simple as not breaking the law.

Have you ever been pulled over with a white passenger and watched as law enforcement questioned their safety? Have you ever called the cops and they never came? Have you ever called the cops and became the criminal?

Senator Pearce, when the Nazi party was crowning you a great statesman, did you feel heroic? Did you see Superman in your reflection? Is it the way his uniform and you wave red, white, and blue over Arizona’s streets?

Superman was from Krypton, Senator Pearce. He was an alien.

No one asked for his ID because he was smart enough to be born white. Welcome to Arizona. The Grand Canyon state welcomes whites only, labeling people of color guilty until proven otherwise.

But we are not new to this. We’ve been asked to deep-throat your blaming fingers before: the exclusion acts, repatriation, Proposition 187, repatriation, Japanese internment, repatriation.

It’s when we stop working for you and start working for ourselves is when we no longer belong. It’s when we start standing on our feet instead of falling to our knees.

While refried bean-smeared swastikas decorate capitol buildings in Phoenix, legal brown people are being marked reasonably suspicious in a place they once thought of as home. Or is this all for revenge, Senator Pearce? Is it because an illegal immigrant shot your son?

Would I feel safer in Arizona if he was shot by a white man?

Please read the following Everyday Feminism articles to learn more about anti-immigrant oppression:

[do_widget id=”text-101″]

Ela Barton is a queer poet and artist living in Seattle, Washington. She is the 2007 Bainbridge Island Poetry Slam Champion, a four-time finalist of the Seattle Poetry Slam Grand Slam (2009,2010, 2011, 2012) and the first woman to win Jack McCarthy’s Evergreen Invitational (2011). She is the current co-slammaster & founder of the Rain City Poetry Slam and adapted the concept of Vancouver’s “Mashed Poetics” to create a similar monthly, music inspired, poetry show, Liner Notes. Please follow her on twitter @Ela_Vader.