By Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin is the author of four books of poetry, including Good Stock, which will be published by Coffee House Press in 2016. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

My mother, who was born more than eighty years ago, deep in the Jim Crow South, insists that she has never experienced a single moment of racism. I have never heard her say a derogatory word about white people as a race or use the word “white” as an insult. When she calls people “black,” she does not do so affectionately, to suggest kinship, community, or…