Reader:  Jacqueline Brookreson

Respondent: Giselle Hewitt

Recorder: Yolie Luttrell

"Blonde White Woman"

By Patricia Smith

Unsettling America, pp 77-79

Biographical Information:

Patricia Smith was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois.  Patricia started her poetry career while she was covering the National Turf Poetry Festival as a reporter from the Chicago Sun times.  In 1991, she and her husband moved from Chicago to Boston where she got a job working at the Boston Globe.  Smith's poems and performances grew directly out of articles that she had written for the Times and the Globe.  It didn't take Patricia long to become one of the most well-known and respected slam poets.  In 1998, Patricia was nominated for and favored to win, the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.  But Patricia withdrew her name from consideration when rumors started circulating that her newspaper column's stories were fabricated.  After admitting she had done so, she not only lost her job, but her marriage and the Pulitzer.  Patricia suffered public ridicule for what she had done, but she was to bounce back.  In 1998, she revived her poetry and has since become the poet of the people. 

Literary Objectives:

Obj. 4b  To distinguish the ideology of American racialism- which sees races as pure, separate, and permanent identities

Obj. 6  To observe images of the individual, the family, and the alternative families in the writings and experience of minority groups.

Interpretation:

Blondes do have more fun.  Patricia Ann thought that to be a blonde white woman was to be the best.  In her eyes she saw that they were perfect.  Perfect teeth, perfect hair, and a perfect name.  Donna.  As a child she wanted to be that perfect human, but then she was a darker side when her first grade teacher wanted her to let go.  She took that to mean that there was something wrong with her and that being black was almost disgusting.  But now, that she is older, she resents what she once thought was perfection.  The final stanza shows us that. 

Questions:

1.  What do you take the first line of the poem to be? 

2.  Do you think that the blonde white women of the world ever feel like what Patricia feels and wants to change also?

3.  How do you take the last line of the poem?

Discussion:

(Recorder was absent.)