Analysis Of Creative Loafing By Vanessa Huang

Vanessa Huang is a Black American rights activist. She responds to issues such as racial profiling and government policing through her poetry. Whereas many other Asian American poets typically write about their ethnic identity, Huang writes about an ethnicity that is not hers—Black American. She writes protest literature, exposing Black American’s inferior treatment by the mainstream culture. In an interview with Andrew Alexander, a journalist for Creative Loafing, Huang speaks about her thoughts on racism in the form of biased imprisonment. She argues that, “government policing and prisons have become a tool to manage all the social problems and inequities” (Alexander). This means that the genuineness of criminal justice is highly questionable.

Huang moves outside her own ethnicity to better understand Black American racism, and spread awareness about the injustices of government policing. She focuses on the impacts racism has on Black Americans, and the permanency of those impacts as Black parents and guardians pass down warnings and how-tos through their lineages. Her activist poetry is similar to those written by the first generation. Marilyn Chin uses her poetry as a gateway for her to express her anger with her forced assimilation. Huang also shares her feelings of anger and sadness via her poems. Carlos Bulosan uses his poetry to explain Filipino racism and encourage his readers to join their movement to create socially, economically, and politically equal communities. Huang responds to Black American racism through her poetry and wishes to “make worlds where each and all of us are free” (Huang). Although Huang does focus on Black American prejudice, she also focuses on various other social issues. She states that her poetry and practice “inherit teachings from the prison abolition, migrant justice, gender liberation, transformative justice, disability justice, and reproductive justice movements” (Huang). Huang discusses issues about racism, gender and sexuality, immigrant rights, disabled persons rights, and women’s rights. All of these are important social issues that affect anyone and everyone. She is an extremely versatile poet and activist, and should be read by people across the globe, so that we may better understand the hardships of various communities and subcultures, and move one step closer to a peaceful