dear white america

Danez Smith invokes the poplar tree toward the beginning of their poem when they write “neither did the poplar tree” (Line 10) as a follow-up to the ideas of color blindness. The poplar tree is representative of the lynching of many Black men and women who were hung to death in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a tree, and thus it is not physically able to enact violence without the help of the KKK and other racist individuals who used its branches. It also can’t see race, but this doesn’t disentangle the poplar tree from these horrifically violent acts to which they are historically tied.

The poplar tree has a long literary history and is most famously invoked in Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit.” The song was written and composed by Avel Meeropol in 1939. Meeropol, an American songwriter, and poet whose works were published under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, drew the lyrics from a poem he wrote in 1937. The song was written to protest the lynching of Black Americans. In the lyrics, the hanging bodies of the victims are compared to the fruit of trees. The song has been cited as “the beginning of the civil rights movement” and continues to inspire artists across all mediums even to this day.