21 pages • 42-minute read
dear white america
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Background
Literary Context
Danez Smith invokes the poplar tree toward the beginning of their poem when they write “neither did the poplar tree” (Line 10) as a follow-up to the ideas of color blindness. The poplar tree is representative of the lynching of many Black men and women who were hung to death in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a tree, and thus it is not physically able to enact violence without the help of the KKK and other racist individuals who used its branches. It also can’t see race, but this doesn’t disentangle the poplar tree from these horrifically violent acts to which they are historically tied.
The poplar tree has a long literary history and is most famously invoked in Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit.” The song was written and composed by Avel Meeropol in 1939. Meeropol, an American songwriter, and poet whose works were published under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, drew the lyrics from a poem he wrote in 1937. The song was written to protest the lynching of Black Americans. In the lyrics, the hanging bodies of the victims are compared to the fruit of trees. The song has been cited as “the beginning of the civil rights movement” and continues to inspire artists across all mediums even to this day.
Historical Context
“dear white america” was published in 2017, which sets its publication in the midst of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. BLM is a decentralized political and social movement that aims to shed light on racism, discrimination, and the daily inequalities experienced by Black people. The movement has become synonymous with protesting incidents of police brutality and other acts of racially motivated violence against Black people. By virtue of it being decentralized, the movement contains many related organizations and is void of hierarchy. However, there is a centralized focus on advocating for various policy changes concerning Black liberation.
The movement began in July 2013, with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting and death of Black teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012. The movement gained momentum, became nationally recognized during street demonstrations following the 2013 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City. Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the deaths of numerous other Black people, whose lives have been unlawfully taken at the hands of the police.
The movement returned to domestic headlines, and gained further international attention, during the protests in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. An estimated 15 million to 26 million people participated in the 2020 BLM protests in the United States, making it one of the largest movements in the country’s history. With a central focus on criminal justice reform, the movement branches out to encompass a wide span of views and demands.
“dear white america” is written precisely in the midst of this social justice movement, and even makes reference to Trayvon Martin, the teenage boy whose murder sparked the movement. The entirety of Smith’s work can be placed within the Black Lives Matter movement and will without a doubt continue to be canonical with the prevailing political climate.
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