Not an Elegy for Mike Brown

Stanzas 6-12 make a number of allusions to mythology, accentuating mythology’s allegorical—and in turn, fictional—quality. With this denotation in mind, Smith juxtaposes a myth that centers whiteness against the very real narratives of the Black community.

While historians have long suspected the Trojan war—Sparta’s 10-year siege of Troy—was a real historical event, the version relayed through Homer’s Iliad is mythological, and it was sparked by the kidnapping (actually, in Homer’s account, elopement) of Spartan King Menelaus’s beautiful wife, Queen Helen. Helen, characterized as the “white girl” (Line 12), was never harmed in the conflict because she never existed. However, Mike Brown—along with countless other Black people—did exist, dying very real, very painful deaths at the hands of the police and a system that protects whiteness over Blackness. This thematic concern is central in understanding the sheer depth of the roots of racial inequality in the fabric of American society in particular.

The bare fact of the poem’s inclusion of Greek mythology is an oblique commentary on Black American marginalization. A story near the heart of Western civilization, the Trojan War and all its lofty mythological trappings spring so easily to mind that the white figures, like Helen, are part of Western vocabulary, working as shorthand for virtues like beauty.