ABSTRACT
The Black body has long raised fears in White people, from fear of the rape of White women by Black men, often invoked during the period of African slavery, to justification of police shootings through the argument that Black men are more likely to be dangerous. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael encouraged a rally of African Americans to demand 'Black Power'; by the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Black Power had become a movement. While Giovanni's poems engage Black children with realities of a White-dominated world, the Coards' Getting to Know Ourselves looks outward in a different way, using the Black child's body to build a sense of global African community. To hate our skin, our hair, to hate our features, hate our blood, hate what we are' (181). The hatred that Malcolm X describes is physical, written on the body, and not confined to older people of African descent.
