Color Coded

Color Coded
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On the poetics of Donald Trump, the progress of poetry, and reverse racism
By Jaswinder Bolina

When the blond girl shouted "Hey!" and ran over to stop my bicycle, a voltage of hope charged through my 12-year-old body. No blond girl had ever stopped me in all the years I'd ridden my bike down the lane between the park district playground and rows of suburban townhouses. No blond girl had ever stopped me anywhere. I thought she might want to know my name. Maybe we'd walk across the way to sit on the park swings. It was 1990. I'd never kissed a girl. This might be love. As I settled to a stop, she landed her hands on mine, squeezed, looked me straight in the face, and with a grave seriousness asked, "Are you a Hindu or a Gandhi?" Her mouth broke into a sneer before she released me and ran back to a gallery of cackling friends, their laughter chasing me down the lane past the fractured expanse of the tennis courts to the quiet of the comics shop a mile or so away.

This wasn't the worst thing anyone had ever done to me. Even by 12, I'd taken plenty a slur, but this encounter with the girl was a total non sequitur, gratuitous and nonsensical. Gandhi is a name, not an epithet. My family isn't Hindu, and even if we were, I'm not sure how being described as such is an insult. Beyond the merits of her mockery was the exertion it required, that she went so out of her way to stop me. I should probably dismiss this as an artifact of adolescence, but that would ignore the sophistication in it.

Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.

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