‘Our Cities Still’ Performance Poetry by Carlynn Newhouse [Video]

By Button Poetry

Transcript provided by YouTube and edited with AI. Please excuse any discrepancies from the original performance. 

I’m originally from Seattle, and when people ask me what it’s like, I tell them that my city is predominantly white. It’s so white that it gave us Macklemore. It’s so white that there are more grocery stores for dogs than for people. It’s a progressive city, but it’s the kind of white where I have to put up a sign in my yard to prove I’m not racist. I love black men so much that I want to have mixed-race babies. It’s the kind of white where we’ve legalized weed, and there are dispensaries on every corner. It’s the kind of white where 420 stoner culture is prevalent.

But at the same time, it’s the kind of white that puts black people in jail for selling the same thing. My city’s whiteness made me want to leave. I wanted to be around more black people, so when I got to DC, I was amazed. It was a town full of brown, and I had never seen so many black people before. The locals asked if I was new there, and I said yes, explaining that I had never experienced this much black magic before. They told me that DC used to be different, a true chocolate city, before the influx of white residents, condos, and companies. They said that white folks saw a diamond in their coal mine, turning this black wonderland into something else.

Now I see it. White women jogging with their dogs, letting them pee on the yard at Howard University. Every month, a new Whole Foods pops up that resembles my city. Due to redlining, the Seattle Central District, which used to be predominantly black, is now filled with white coffee shops, and hipsters consider it cool. Gentrification is like a child stealing a toy they claimed they never wanted to play with. My city is so white that it calls your neighborhood promising, only to love Georgetown and Fremont in a few years. They would never be caught dead in the Central District, Southeast, or Baltimore.

Facts: white folks sip lattes and reminisce about what it used to feel like to be afraid to live in our cities. Washington State and Washington DC are opposite sides of the same coin. No matter where you go in this country, black people still lose, and white people still win. Gentrification looks a lot like colonization when you examine it closely. Fiction: black communities needed white folks to save them. Fact: we’ve been saving ourselves all along. Covering the streets with coffee shops won’t erase the history and struggles of the black communities. Our stories can make you whole, but our cities can also leave you wrecked. From Seattle to DC, our cities are still black, our cities are still whole, and our cities are still here.

[Applause]

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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Carlynn Newhouse, performing at the 2022 Womxn of the World Poetry Slam in Baltimore, MD.

About Button:

Button Poetry is committed to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for spoken word and performance poetry.

We seek to showcase the power and diversity of voices in our community. By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, we hope to broaden poetry’s audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.

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