"Can you kill a white man" - poem of Cho's teacher

[Abedwego]

Expatriate Poet wrote:

Dear Nikki Giovanni,

If you are aware of what is transpiring on this site, either as the author of the poem that has just comforted this nation, or as someone who is engaged in the world of American poetry as few others have been, and have concern always for equal opportunity and justice for all, please come here and talk to us. Because your poem needs you to help it to take its place in history and move on. We are poets and can deal with paradoxes here, even ones as stark as that between your preserving instinct in the Virginia Tech poem and your destroying instinct in your poem that begins: "Nigger/can you kill!"

I decided to come on this site partly because of Expat's rap--then I got incensed by Sim's junk talk and got distracted. But this is far more important, because your "Can You Kill" poem really does cry out for some help from you, Nikki Giovanni, it really does. Because of course it can be read in the way Monday Love says it can be read--that's the most sensitive and deepest reading, in fact, and the one that we're ready for but need your help to be sure. "Destroy in yourself the inferior image you carry in yourself," the poem is saying, isn't it?  "Kill the nigger in yourself and you'll be free of that nigger forever!"

In other words, don't get hung up in how the concept arose, because that won't free you. Just free youself once and for all and you're done!

i.e. JUST KILL IT!

ABWG

[Sim]

Is the penultimate line in Ms. Giovanni's poem, 'learn to kill niggers' supposed to read 'learn to kill, niggers' as in 'learn to kill, you niggers,' or 'learn to kill niggers.'  I'm not sure how much irony is intended in the poem.  Is she literally exhorting blacks to kill whites in the poem?  Or, is the underlying message, "Stop being niggers (slaves of the white man) and don't kill anyone."  I assume she's saying the latter.  Of course the fact that it has this easily understood, quantified message makes it so awfully boring.

Well, she obvioously calls to kill the obedient Uncle Tom   inside to "free your black hands to strangle"  and afteward to

" stab-a-Jew"
" run a protestant down"
"piss on a blond head ... cut it off"
"kill a white man"
"splatter their brains in the street"
 
This does not mean that she is necessarily going to do all these things, but the same one can say about the comedian, whose far less hateful tyrade caused so much press coverage recently.

[alan]

So, this thread is now the #1 search for the phrase "Can You Kill a White Man" and "politician" David Duke's site is ranked below.  What a world. :?

[Bugzita]

Bumming big time.

Bugz

[Sim]

So, this thread is now the #1 search for the phrase "Can You Kill a White Man" and "politician" David Duke's site is ranked below.  What a world. :?

Because the thread is titled "Can You Kill a White Man." If you make a Google search for the first words of the poem "Nigger can you kill" it will not come up the first.

Do you argue using "reductio ad Dukem?" That is if Dr. Duke eats with fork and a spoon then we must eat with hands?