EXORCISING WHITENESS: KHALISA RAE’S GHOST IN A BLACK GIRL’S THROAT (The Rumpus)
I was new to the seventh grade when Ms. Rossi routinely refused to acknowledge me. Though my hand stabbed the air in response to questions she posed, Ms. Rossi never called my name. “What d’ya think, Hillary?” or “Rebecca, you give it a go!” Each time Ms. Rossi’s eyes roamed over my hovering wicker-brown arm and landed on a white girl’s freckled face, her lesson, reserved for the few Black girls in her “gifted” class, was reaffirmed—keep your hand down and mouth shut.
In Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, published by Red Hen Press last month, Khalisa Rae has written a haunting and holy gospel. At once a book of genesis and revelation, Rae’s full-length debut collection unveils white supremacy’s forging by fire of Black girls into circus, freak show, tightrope walker, stage performer, crazy. Rae does this through the lens of a Black woman who journeys from the Midwest to find a home in the American South, chronicling the inescapability of misogynoir’s violence. In “Ghosts in a Black Girl Throat,” the collection’s opening poem and origin story, Rae begins her proverbial sermon with the why of whiteness’s attack—
… And that’s what they will come
for first—the throat.They know that be your superpower,
your furnace of rebellion. So they silence
you before the coal burns…The leash will always be taut, gripping
around a word you never said…
