Whitewash explores the civil rights era and its lingering tensions in Shreveport, Louisiana. Narrative and lyrical poetry weave an intricate collection of voices struggling to come to terms with racism, complicity, and hypocrisy. Deeply researched, Frances Victory Schenkkan's poems also confront her own religious and family histories alongside these portraits of a fractured city-layering them into a broader examination of the ways that American culture, like The Great Raft that once stymied Shreveport growth, still bears many griefs in need of healing.