Dead Black People on the Stage

A few minutes after "The Remedy" was read, a disturbed member of the audience came to the podium and expressed his profound shock over the poem. One of the comments (paraphrase, from memory) was:

"There are dead black people on this stage."

He was 100% correct. The poem succeeded in this regard if that was his response.

And while it is clear from the context of the remark that he and I were not "seeing" (as a piece of art can allow "seeing") the same dead black people on stage, the poem does conjure them.

In the context of the poem, as it clearly makes comparisons between eugenics, Darwin, coons, Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood and a vocal advocate of eugenics), and books being burned (the result of Nazi philosophy), the burned niggers at the end of the poem evoke the aborted fetuses.

The number of aborted African-American babies is more than double the number of Jews who were eliminated in the Nazi's Final Solution.

Whether or not the immense pile of dead, black fetuses are merely tissue, without rights, or actual human beings, is not the point of the poem. But yes, "they" are there on stage, in history, in fact, in my country, and in my time.

Alveda King, a niece of Rev. Martin Luther King, said of Planned Parenthood, at a 2008 protest of the NAACP:

"It has led the way in eliminating African-Americans to the point where one quarter of the black population is now missing because of abortion. Planned Parenthood is anti-life and we are here to say enough is enough!"