Structural Violence and Injustice

The overarching theme in Don’t Call Us Dead is the pervasiveness of structural violence and injustice in contemporary American life. All of the poems in the collection examine the effects of systemic intolerance against either black or queer people, and many of them use an intersectional lens to examine both. The collection focuses on three dominant American institutions to demonstrate the power structures that systematically disadvantage black and queer subjects: whiteness, law enforcement, and religion.

Smith rarely represents white characters as individuals, choosing instead to portray whiteness as a societal construct in order to highlight its place in systems of oppression. One poem directly addresses white Americans, and it is therefore the clearest example of whiteness as a beneficiary of injustice. In “dear white america,” Smith confronts the platitudes and excuses that white individuals might make in order to avoid addressing the...