White, Too Lyrics

If another white person tells me to stop and be only what they want me to be

To not put my elbows on the table

To not eat with my hands but to cut my tortilla with a knife and fork

To not paint my house pink, purple or orange

To talk quieter in public and not raise my voice

Even though sometimes all I've got to raise is my voice

If another white person tells me to believe in white myths

Like George Washington cutting down the cherry tree

Or how all white Americans are Adams and Eves and the Indians were only savage animals left outside the Garden

Or to remember the Alamo the white way and to forget it from the Mexican view

Or to accept slavery as a national pastime

And to not honor my black brothers and sisters who were raped from their motherland

Who like African pearls were chained together and returned to oceanic depths

Who were humans of burden

Dying slowly under the white man's whip and sun

And to not honor my Asian brothers whose sisters and wives were locked outside American boundaries so their men could keep working on the railroad

Like Buddhist monks with picks and hammers tied to their yellow effeminate wrists

If another white person tells me how to worship God and to close my mouth when I feel like screaming for joy

And to shut my eyes when I feel like flooding the earth with my tears

And to bow to a cross instead of to my god

And that white people can judge me just as well and even better than god can

And when I ask why they tell me

Because Jesus is white with blue eyes and speaks English with a Texas drawl

If another white person tells me that everyone should speak English even when they are visiting a foreign country

That I should stop speaking Mexican because it sounds like poverty

That all the niggers should go back to Africa

That all the sand niggers should return to the desert

And that anyone else who doesn't enunciate English like a white person should leave this white country

If another damn white motherfucker tells me that I can't be brown and white but that I have to choose and that I must choose white

Because white is the future

White is success

White is the dominant that will continue to spread and fill the lungs of the world like small pox

Hiding in Indian babies' blankets

Like Japanese internment camps choking freedom

Like lynch ropes strangling the strange black fruit

Like white faces shoving the Mexican bodies out of their own country

And white will keep spreading until black, brown, red, yellow, copper, and any other color are different shades of white

If another white person tells me to erase my culture and to lose my ethnicity and to be what they want me to be

Well, I just might become

White, too