Unraveling Whiteness

Using Poetry to Challenge White Supremacy

A Virtual Panel

This panel was originally scheduled to take place during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2020, Washington, D.C., March 26-28: Festival Website

Panelists:
Tara Campbell, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Holly Karapetkova, and Edgar Gabriel Silex

Panel Chair: Katherine E. Young

This website offers a brief survey of materials prepared for Unraveling Whiteness: Using Poetry to Challenge White Supremacy panel planned for Split This Rock 2020. These materials include the panel description (below), a list of suggested tools and techniques for challenging white supremacy in writing, the beginnings of a reading list on the topic, brief speaking notes from some of the panelists, and panelist bios. However, this website is by no means a comprehensive resource on the subject, nor it is a substitute for the conversations and brainstorming with audience members originally envisioned by the panelists.

If “cultural change always precedes political change,” as Jeff Chang asserts in Who We Be, then in an age of resurgent white supremacy, poets have a responsibility—and an opportunity—to shift the national conversation about race. How can we use poetry to confront and expose whiteness, both in its overt forms of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions, as well as in its more subtle forms of complacency and complicity? Believing that words can shift the conversation about race and help us combat our national scourge, five poets writing from multiple perspectives will demonstrate specific tools and techniques they’ve used to combat white supremacy in their writing. During the last half-hour, session participants will be invited to share ways they interrogate whiteness in their own reading and writing practice and brainstorm ways they can carry this conversation beyond the writing community.