Sabrina Brancato

Where Whiteness Fears To Tread Sabrina Brancato

There are many ways to write about race. Among them, poetry is possibly the one that most strongly expresses, interrogates and affects emotions. Exploring the uncomfortable territory of implicit racial biases, Where Whiteness Fears to Tread contains fifty lyrics that appeal to emotion as well as to understanding, and remind us that if we still believe that the subject of race does not concern us all, we have been missing something. The poetic voice is that of a white mother struggling to raise self-confident and free-spirited Black children against the backdrop of prejudice and supremacy. A recurrent and evocative line affirms the right of children to just be children and not carry the burden of prejudice: A child is a child is a child is a child. How about a Black child?