maple heights.

i wish I could tell my friends whose only familiar face in class was their own that my childhood was picture-perfect black elation, where black history month was the height of a year-long celebration and we learned about black creations instead of the upsides of segregation. but black faces in black places don’t matter when educators with white faces insist they’re not racist. we should all be gracious–we’re their new charity cases, a rehabilitation project for the projects to be projected onto, so that if even just a few could transform, take flight, assimilate white, the immaculate conception of centrist black messiah to end the negro plight built in the splitting image of the white child they wished you could be. if I had a dime for every time a black classroom was reduced to “you people” i’d bail out my friends sent down the prison pipeline for slapboxing at lunchtime today and fund black teachers tomorrow so black babies never had to grow up and out of believing in white saviors and black childhood could be immortalized in hot summer days soothed by fire hydrants and Kool-Aid and school was filled with stories of certified black excellence in fields that didn’t cause brain damage by thirty five. 

Maui Smith is a junior studying Information Science and Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. They are currently working as a Technical Writer Co-Op at ANSYS Inc. and as a Spring 2020 intern at Study Breaks magazine. They are currently based out of Pittsburgh, PA but are originally from Maple Heights, Ohio.  

A Song for Maui