I wanted to focus my found poem on the black injustices and police brutality going on in America. The discrimination and racism shown towards people of color has been an on going issue in Americafor hundreds of years. People of color has had to face many obstacles such as slavery, Jim crow, segregration, lack of rights for centuries. In modern day, the injustices that people of color face has to stop since it is becoming more of a life or death matter.
In order to create this poem, I wanted to highlight a fraction of the black people that were killed by police officers. In order to do so I had to get a list of these people and from there I just pulled out a few names from the list and added the reason for why they were killed. I added the reasons to emphasize that no matter what we do, people of color will continue to be targeted and killed for basic human actions, unless there are actions taken to stop police brutality. My found poems highlight the names of these victims similar to the way the Black Lives Matter symbol is with the black background and white writing, and also uses bold and italics. All of these tactics were used to help convey the idea of taking action to end discrimination.
Hi Khaleah! I really enjoyed reading your found poem because it’s such an important topic for people to be educated on. The repetition in the poem really emphasizes police brutality and the continuous battle to fight for equality. This especially is so relevant to what’s going on right now as Derek Chauvin was found guilty for murdering George Floyd yesterday. Seeing all of those names of people who were affected by police brutality made me upset and emphasized how it needs to come to an end. This list also reminded me of Citizen when the list of “In Memory of…” just kept going on and on.