Blay, Yaba. “How the ‘One Drop Rule’ Became a Tool of White Supremacy.” LitHub, 22 Feb. 2001.1
CBC Radio. “Black Teen Shot in the Head After Knocking on the Wrong Door Doing ‘Exceptionally Well.’” CBC Radio, 19 Apr. 2023.2
Zepeda, Robert, and Susie Whitley. “What Would You Do If You Saw a Black Father with a White Child Being Harassed?” ABC News, 25 Jan. 2011.3
Orphanides, Alexandros. “Why Mixed-Race Americans Will Not Save the Country.” NPR, 8 Mar. 2017.4
1 My mother is part Filipino, part / unknown white male, a part / of her she has searched the Earth for / in each drop of her blood, maybe / to know who to blame, maybe / to find one small piece of herself / that can survive here.
2 It’s a miracle he’s doing so well / after a bullet entered his face / at point blank range and tore through / his brain before heading into the neighborhood / all because he was a black boy at a white door / lost and looking for directions / only to find a blaze of light and pain / he’s doing so well // except his speech and his movement and / his cognition, how his brain is trying to process / what his heart knew about survival and how / in that moment the bullet was many bullets / fired from the very beginning of all this / and is passing through him still.
3 I could offer him nothing / except a beer and the chance to share / some stories about America like the one time / my sister hurt herself at the playground / and when my white stepfather finally came / the park official pulled him aside and said / sir, she’s a black girl / or the one time a friend confided / how she had a white fiancé / and she asked him how he would protect them / her and her black son / and he believed that marriage would solve it / that her son would be his son / as if whiteness would become an umbrella / and offer anyone his shade of protection / like my father / whose work friend remarked, This is your son? / and my father stepped forward / and said yes.
4 They heard one line of MLK, Jr. and forgot the rest / they imagined a bright city / high up on some hill somewhere / where everyone—white, black, brown, red, yellow, purple— / would be accepted, but don’t / forget what came first in line, don’t / zoom in and hear a woman growl / go back to your own country / to a brown boy who’s never left that street, don’t / look at the bodies beneath the river surface / their hands supplicant / their mouths a drowned prayer, don’t / look at all the shadows / despite the number of mestisos / burning themselves alive for light.
Erik Armstrong (he/him/his), a Filipino mestizo writer, is a graduate of the Solstice MFA Creative Writing Program, and he is a Professor of English at College of the Sequoias, where he teaches academic and creative writing. His recent creative work was featured in Storytelling, an ekphrastic art installation, and in the Fall 2025 of Watershed Review. His academic writing has been published in Composition Studies and by USC’s Race and Equity Center.
