Swing and a Miss

I'm not entirely sure how to evaluate this work as a whole. There are many poems about many things from many points of view.

I guess the one that I recall the most vividly would be a couple of the ones that seemed to deal heavily with race and discrimination. "One Black Girlhood" was kind of wild. The speaker spends two and a half stanzas describing herself as a white man in vivid details like "wavy and feathered" hair, the Seventies, and so on until dropping the bomb that this person is actually a "small, black girl".

I will now express my reaction with a traditoinal colloquialism from my generation: WTF??

Is this girl just pretending? Has she been watching too much television? Is this her ultimate, unachievable goal that she will spend the rest of her life longing for (most people have at least one)?

Reading back over for clues as to what the heck just happened, all I could gather to unite the white man and the black girl was the gesture of "watching myself over my shoulder". Perhaps looking back at who she was in the past? Unless she's had Michael Jackson's skin condition and a sex change, this seems very unlikely to be a literal description of her life. So how does this work? How does a "small, black girl" gain such insight into the white man that she "never doubted" was her?

Anyone?