17 pages • 34 minutes read
Danez Smithjuxtaposing the black boy & the bullet
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Racial Justice
While Smith does not explicitly state their political beliefs, this poem is uncompromising in its support for the belief that Black lives matter. This can certainly be inferred by studying the author and their other work and public statements, but the poem itself also supports the interpretation.
This starts with the title. Smith uses the words “black boy” in the title. This is a deliberate choice that serves two functions. The first function is to elicit pathos in the reader. By using “boy” instead of “man,” Smith conjures the image of a child. For most people, the juxtaposition of a child and a bullet is tense. Children are associated with innocence and life, and a bullet is designed to kill. Especially in a country familiar with mass shootings at schools and where children dying at the hands of guns is not entirely uncommon, this juxtaposition automatically engages the reader. An avid reader of poetry might see this juxtaposition and make a connection to Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789)—William Blake’s poems that juxtapose contrasting images, including several that center children.
The second purpose of the word “boy” is more cultural. Throughout American history, African Americans have often had to endure the degrading experience of having their name replaced by the word “boy” by White people as a sign of disrespect. The late Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. even referenced this in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he explained how demeaning it is to be renamed “boy.”
Smith seems to be doing two things with this association here. The first thing they are doing is reclaiming the term “black boy,” which could be a reference to the novel Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright—one of the most important texts about the African American experience in the 1900s. By reappropriating the term, Smith infuses it with the power of the person who is described instead of ceding that power to the people who traditionally used the term.
The second thing this association does is it locates this poem within this tradition of poetry about racial justice. Smith wants readers to see the title and form all the cultural and historical associations they may from the words they read. By using a term with such a deep history, Smith ensures their readers will have some form of reaction simply from reading the title.
Gun Culture in America
To reiterate, Smith does not state their position on gun control or gun culture in general. While they certainly write a lot about gun violence, this poem does not openly advocate for nor oppose anything. It just makes use of juxtaposition to express ideas about race and violence.
That said, the poem is certainly politically charged. There are two particularly strong messages about guns: The first is that people in America too often equate guns with human life; the second is that too often, guns are the cause of death for Black people.
Regardless of one’s political beliefs, these two facts are difficult to deny. America does have a type of love relationship with guns—it always has. During the expansion through the western frontier, the gun was known as the equalizer. It was a tool that settlers used to “tame” what they saw as a wild world. It was a way to conquer the land, which became synonymous with the settler, the rancher, and the cowboy. This environment was mythologized by American popular culture in the 20th century when Western movies ruled the screen and American icons like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood became folk heroes for their cinematic exploits. This translated to mass gun ownership (in 2022, guns outnumber people in America) and to the saturation of media with guns in video games, movies, television, and music. The gun became a symbol of power and status: It was romanticized. And in the 21st century, the gun became a political symbol often equated with freedom and Americanness.
It is also impossible to deny that Black people have traditionally borne the brunt of gun violence at a higher level than other races. According to Everytown, a gun violence research group, Black Americans “experience 10 times the gun homicides, 18 times the gun assault injuries, and nearly 3 times the fatal police shootings of white Americans.”
Thus, Smith is commenting on two things that cannot be argued in good faith. Because Smith does not advocate for a specific political position or policy, though, the poem has the potential to reach a broader audience. If the poem was partisan in any way, some people might defensively read it. And while some people might do this anyway because of the poem’s subject matter, this poem—if read in good faith—doesn’t really attack any political side. It just states facts and highlights a terrible reality.
Political Division
While the first two themes comprise the heart of the poem, Smith also touches on the reality of political division. Particularly, the final stanza conflates the debates about gun control and racial justice. Interestingly, Smith uses a binary to explain people’s feelings about guns and Black bodies. They say people either want to protect them or get rid of them. While this is the either/or rhetorical fallacy, Smith intentionally uses the fallacy. The idea is to both show how absurd such a conflation is (human lives with objects) and to demonstrate how polarized the country is about both issues. This adds to the absurdity of the poem’s rhetorical situation and contributes a depressing note to the end of the poem, as it seems impossible that two sides so deeply divided could ever come together to fix the problem.
A final aspect worth noting is the use of the either/or fallacy. Some might argue that when discussing issues of human justice, there is no fallacy. This is a line of reasoning taken from thinkers like King, who argued that when it comes to justice, there can be no half measures. These thinkers contend that in order to be fully on the side of justice, one must be fully committed to eliminating any social ill that negatively affects justice.
For Smith, this directly ties to Black Lives Matter. Smith argues that people either believe Black lives matter or they don’t. There is no in-between. There is no, “Yeah, but …” or “Yeah, but also …” There is simply Black Lives Matter and do what must be done to ensure that "Black Lives Matter" actually means something in contemporary American society. For Smith, there is absolutely no room for nuance when it comes to social justice because this is a matter of life or death and human dignity.
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By Danez Smith
