“Telephone Conversation” is a poem that satirizes racism.
The speaker, who is black, makes fun
of a white landlady who won’t rent to the speaker until she knows whether the speaker’s skin is
“dark” or “light.” In contrast to the landlady’s simple, reductive ideas about race, the speaker
suggests that race and identity are complicated and multi-faceted. Judging a person based on
their skin color, the poem argues, is thus ignorant, illogical, and dehumanizing.
At first the landlady seems ready to move forward with renting to the speaker, even “swearing”
that “she lived / Off premises.” She can’t detect the speaker’s race through the phone, a fact
that emphasizes a) that the speaker’s identity is comprised of more than his or her race and b)
that skin color is irrelevant to the speaker’s suitability as a tenant.
But when the speaker then makes a “self-confession” about being “African,” the conversation
abruptly shifts to a discussion of skin tone. Note that the speaker is being ironic in the use of
“confession” here, a word typically associated with the revelation of something criminal, to
undermine the racist notion that being “African” is a bad thing. Clearly, the speaker understands
how black people’s housing prospects are unfairly limited by a racist society.
Indeed, in response to this “confession” the landlady asks whether the speaker’s skin is “light” or
dark”—a question so absurd that the speaker briefly wonders if he or she has “misheard.” The
landlady is playing into the ignorant idea that black people with lighter skin (and, as such, whose
skin is closer in appearance to that of white people) are superior to those with darker skin. The
key thing that matters to her, then, is how black the speaker looks. Instead of asking what the
speaker does professionally, what the speaker's habits are—that is, instead of treating the
speaker like an actual human being and potential tenant—the landlady reduces the speaker to a
single attribute: skin color. Racism, the poem thus makes clear, is inherently reductive and
dehumanizing.
As such, the speaker refuses to answer the landlady’s question directly, instead offering a series
of clever replies that reveal the landlady’s question to be not just offensive but also utterly
illogical. For instance, the speaker describes him or herself as “West African sepia” (a kind of
reddish-brown hue seen in old monochromatic photos) in the speaker's passport, a joke that
goes right over the slow-witted landlady’s head; essentially this is like saying, “Well, in a black
and white photograph my skin is gray.”
The speaker also notes that the human body isn’t just one color: the speaker's face is
“brunette,” but the speaker's palms and foot soles are “peroxide blonde.” The speaker is being
deliberately tongue-in-cheek in the comparisons here, but the point is that race and identity are
far too complex to be reduced to a simple, binary choice between “dark” or “light,” between
“Button B” or “Button A.”
The speaker doesn’t just criticize the landlady’s blatant racism, then, but also critiques the way
she thinks about race itself. In doing so, the speaker refuses to let the complexity of human
identity be reduced by the ignorant choice that the landlady offers. For all the speaker’s
ingenuity, however, the poem does not end on a triumphant note. As the poem closes, the
landlady is about to hang up on the speaker—suggesting that, as a white person, she still holds
the power in society to effectively silence the black speaker.
