Critical Race Theory By Gwendolyn Brooks

Recently, the topic of Critical Race Theory has entered the cultural zeitgeist. An academic framework used for sociological analysis, it seeks to examine the systems around race and the systemic inequalities that perpetuate racism. Though some say that this kind of thinking creates divisions between races, focusing on a past instead of the more equitable present and future, it is necessary to recognize how the past and how societal systems create the various injustices so apparent throughout society. In the absence of this understanding, mistakes of the past are doomed to be repeated. While having picked up relevancy more recently, Critical Race Theory emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when the poet Gwendolyn Brooks was particularly

Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon”. Written from the perspective of a fictionalized Carolyn Bryant, the woman whose false accusation of harassment led her husband to murder Till, the woman in the poem grapples with the intersections of various marginalized and dominant identities, and how those intersections shape power imbalances throughout a traditionally southern society. The woman, who remains nameless in the poem, while trapped under patriarchy, also demonstrates a complicity in regards to Till’s death.

The woman shows a strict adherence to how Southern society at the time viewed white women and Black men. Black men were made out to be caricatures of exaggerated sexual energy, beings ruled by desire for white women and not bound by any semblance of self control. Meanwhile, white women were painted out to be meek and demure. They were to be protected from the Black men seeking to rape them. This myth of the hypersexual Black man was incredibly harmful, directly leading to the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Black men. Lynch mobs frequently used the myth as a justification for the brutal murders they carried out. This was also the case in the murder of Emmett Till, with the little boy

Especially later in her career, as her work got more and more overtly political, her poems became indictments of various societal phenomena around her. In her poem “Primer for Blacks”, Brooks scathingly calls out the various divisions within the Black community, emphasizing how pride in one’s heritage is essential for the liberation of Black people as a