The Help (Round 3)

Let's workshop this poem about the superficiality and self-serving nature of performative allyship (as it shows itself in and around a watch party for the film The Help)

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The Help

Lip-injected ladies with yorkie haircuts cluster
around the 4k genuflection in Lily’s living room,
a hardcopy of White Fragility on the coffee table.
Boho scarves, campus crusader cosplay, cover
cleavages “raped daily by the white-male gaze.”
Cheeks from the box rosé flushed the very shade
their eat-pray-love type take on while “dancing”
in makeshift runways of mimosa drag brunches
(until sequined queens smack away their gropes 
and physically sit the messes back in their seats),
they side glance (in the screen glow) the token
each had managed to corner before the movie
The Help began. A touch too impatient to reach 
green zones in the spectrum of white identities
(white traitor or even abolitionist of whiteness),
they had cornered their captive black to declare
“Sorry, but white hair sucks”; and to confess how—
“and no shade to the hubby” (wink)—they feel
“so damn terrified around white men, especially 
with all the school shootings (clearly whitelash)
and cops hunting down unarmed black kings
(open season, like lynching 2.0)”; and to reveal
“the fucking unbelievably racist BS whitespeak”
some “colonizer coworker” voiced; and to flaunt
iPhones of biracial goddaughters; and to malign
Debbie, the watch-party no-show: “She’s the one
who really needs this. She’s too fragile to see how
Kia’s to blame for rises in Kia thefts—not blacks!
I mean, if that’s not collusion I don’t know what is!”

The ladies want to honor the “brave” actresses,
later cooing: “Octavia’s so gorgeous! Her skin, it
like literally glows. Look at mine! Like . . . so ugh!”
And they want to honor equity and so “the voice
here with us” who “deserves the chance to speak
her truth first in a safe space as we shut up for once
and stay in our lane.” So they hold a somber hush
(aside from sniffles) well beyond the credit crawl
until—after a heads-bowed interval insufferable,
no doubt, for inebriated know-it-alls “dismayed”
by “white supremacy’s knack for invisibility”—
it is safe to conclude that their queen (“wordless,”
they will later repeat over lunches, “due to pain,
intergenerational traumas, palpable in her eyes”)
tacitly sanctions their eagerness to hold court.
Electrified by the guzzled wine, by the proximity
to the precious, they abandon the usual vigilance
muzzling the obnoxious register of their hunger
for pardon. They unload their teary-boogery pity
for “black folk wrecked by a triple-k Amerikkka”
that “bullies beautiful black babies with algebra
alien to black knowing”—“an antiblack nation
whose supremacist stealth has kings and queens 
second-guessing how disenfranchised they are,”
“leaving many (even many in college) needing
still to learn,” if only from whiteness dismantlers 
like them (“To whom much [privilege] is given,”
after all, “much is required”), “just how helpless
oppression and victimization has made them.” 

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