We won’t shut up and dribble
We won’t juke and jive
We won’t stop kneeling
We won’t stop assembling
We won’t stop talking about it
We won’t stop making you uncomfortable
Because we are uncomfortable
We live uncomfortable
We cope with that lack of comfort
We have hid our pain, despair and our truth
For too long!
Just to be accepted
Just to not be another black person complaining
Just to be seen as more and different
Not indifferent
Even at the cost of our own culture and dignity
But it made no difference
You still cant get past our skin
A color!
This thing that makes me only different in hue
This thing that makes everyone black,
Even if they are mixed,
Just because their darkened shade.
So while this is new to you
This is our everyday
Which we go to the mirror systematically-
Practicing our survivors facade and blending in guise
Each new morning
Before entering back into the world of color
As Doc Rivers just said
We love a country that doesn’t love us back
Why won’t you love us?!
Why won’t you love us?!
Why won’t you love me?…
Why do you judge us-
When we try to show personal pride in culture?
Why are you in such strong denial of our experience,
Returning back to your high vantage points
Only to continue looking down
Why do we assemble in peace and still you see us as aggressors?
Why do you see us in the practicing of our rights as pointless and ungrateful?
Why do you see our unity as aggressive?
Then when aggression finally outbreaks, you use it as justification for prior unsubstantiated Biased claims and assumptions you made long before the happening
Why are you against us?
Why are we so threatening to you?
What did we do?
What did black people do?
Why can’t you love us,
And not merely tolerate our existence?
What do we even have, to do anything with?
We don’t wear cloaks and masks
We don’t assemble at capitols with guns
We don’t stand on yards and aim guns at protestors
We don’t march with hate speech and tiki torches to towns
We don’t have militias
You wouldn’t even allow of a world where blacks could even begin to do these things
We don’t mass shoot people
We don’t normally fire on officers-we fear them!
So why the extreme reactions to us?
We don’t carry out vigilante justice and get passes for it
We don’t shoot up churches and synagogues
Then get the benefit of the doubt
Leaving with our lives
Even being driven to restaurants on the way to jail!
Ending in prison somehow is a luxury now afforded to us,
Instead of a coffin!
We get met with unjust assumption and brutality
That’s our reality!
And any excuse or reasonable logic you can surmise is only dumb, deaf and willfully blind
And equally dangerous in its complicity
We are tired…and this is what it looks like!
So if you are tired of seeing and hearing about it
Then become an ally, advocate, or activist
Or if that’s too much, yet you believe you’re not racist nor culpable
Then instead of judge
Get off your pedastool and help come up with solutions
So yaw can get right back on with your lives
Because ours has been a constant fight
Battles after battles
For a war that only white people can help us win!
Ironically the war for this country, blacks helped you win!
And the defeating truth in it is
Today,
The white community would never have to rely on any outside help or color to save themselves
But we do
And however undignified that is
Still we plead for your attention
Begging for your help!
We love this country
And still you don’t love us!
It’s 2020…
We live now what we learned in classroom history
That is a country wide failure
The fact that we are so cheap to you
Only valuing our bodies
Depreciating our minds
And discounting our contributions
While exploiting our culture
Making us nothing more than consumers
Being owned, sold and traded daily
But we should be so lucky
So lucky that 60% of black people live at or below the poverty line
That our contributions and way of life is largely owned and marketed by White America
That we are the intellectual property of high society
Having minimal rights to our own independence, creativity and ingenuity
Producing our creations with a white face and sound to make a product more consumable
But aye, we got paid for it right?
With our voices still stifled and our plight muffled
And your ears tuned out and eyes wide shut
Because your mind is fixed to see us as something beneath
Needing to be assisted
Basking in the handicaps you’ve systemically placed upon us
Assuring yourself always a place above something
Above someone
Above us…
Because how can you understand those you stand on
How can you pick up that which you stand on
And like has been said by Toni Morrison
How tall are you really, when you’re standing on somebody’s back
Somebody’s…not something
Somebody, more, than an object of your subjection
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