my dream about being white

Lucille Clifton’s “my dream about being white” was published in her 1987 collection Next: New Poems. It is written in first person using free verse and common language to describe a dream the speaker has in which she is white; ultimately, the speaker—presumably Black, like Clifton—rejects the false white identity and finds joyful liberation through doing so.

Clifton’s life and work spanned many changes in the political structure of the United States. She was one of America’s most prominent, lauded poets associated with the Black Arts Movement, and her work dwells on themes of history, spirituality, and feminism. This is one of several poems Clifton wrote about having a dream, including “my dream about time” and “my dream about the second coming.” Clifton is best known for her poem “blessing the boats,” which expresses a wish for a safe passage across troubled waters, and “homage to my hips,” which praises African American feminine beauty. The majority of her work expresses resilience in the face of adversity and a reliance on spirituality for succor. She was a “two-headed woman,” a title given to African and African American women who were believed to have special abilities to contact the spirit world. She was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979-1985.

Poet Biography

Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles on June 27, 1936 in Buffalo, New York. Her parents, African Americans who lived in a town with many white Americans and Polish-speaking immigrants could trace their lineage back to the West African kingdom of Dahomey in what is now The Republic of Benin. When Lucille was born, she had two nonfunctional extra fingers on her hand, a rare genetic condition, and to avoid stigma, her parents had these fingers amputated. Clifton would write about her phantom fingers later in life, as well as about other aspects of her cultural and spiritual inheritance.

In 1953, she was awarded a scholarship to study at Howard University for two years. She left to study at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where she met and married Fred Clifton, a professor of philosophy as well as sculpture. Together they raised six children in Baltimore, where they lived until Fred’s death in 1984.

In 1966, Clifton’s friend Ishmael Reed showed Clifton’s poems to Langston Hughes, a prominent poet and writer of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance Movement, who included her in the anthology The Poetry of the Negro. These were Clifton’s first published poems and began a long and illustrious writing career. In 1969, her first full collection, Good Times, was published and was listed as one of the year’s 10 best books by the New York Times. She went on to publish many more books, including children’s books, a memoir about her family, and several volumes of poetry, including Two-Headed Woman (1980) about the experience of being a medium and spiritual communicator, and Next: New Poems (1987), which contains the poem “my dream about being white.”

Clifton won many awards, including the National Book Award, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Coretta Scott King Award and others. In 1988, she was the first poet to have two books of poems nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. In 1985, she was selected as Poet Laureate of Maryland. After Clifton died in 2010, her daughter bought the family home in Baltimore and turned it into a center for the literary arts.

Poem Text

Clifton, Lucille. “my dream about being white." 1987. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem opens with an interjection, “hey music” (Line 1), which sets the scene of the poem. Next, the speaker focuses attention on what she sees, “me / only white” (Lines 2-3). Then the speaker describes what her “white” (Line 3) self looks like, as “hair a flutter of / fall leaves” (Lines 4-5). She notes that “white me” (Line 10) has a “perfect / line of a nose” (Lines 6-7). Next, the speaker describes what she does not have. She has “no lips, / no behind” (Lines 8-9). Next, she uses figurative language to say she is “wearing / white history” (Lines 11-12). She makes a turn and says, “but there’s no future / in those clothes” (Lines 13-14), so she “take[s] them off” (Line 15). This causes her to “wake up / dancing” (Lines 16-17).