A look at the past to open your eyes to the present |
How would it feel To be chained, To be confined to the point that You could regurgitate at the scent Of your own flesh? To be taken from your home, To new land that is unknown, To a language that is unlearned? Can you imagine it? How would it feel To be oppressed, To have someone controlling Your very existence? To work from dawn until dusk, To have your fingers butchered From being forced to pick the cotton fields? To be a grown man, grown woman And be beaten in front of your peers, Your oppressors, your spouse, and your children And able to do nothing to stop it? I want you to picture it How would it feel To have a man violate you in the night And disown you in the day, Impregnate you with a child of mixed race That he will never acknowledge as his own, Never let your bastard child live As blood of his blood in that big home? Can you see it? How would it feel To long for a freedom That is rightfully yours, To be amputated for trying to claim that freedom To have your flesh and blood Born of you Ripped from your arms and To have your spouse taken from your bed And to have him auctioned and sold To the highest bidder like a prize thoroughbred? To be deprived of the knowledge Confined in a book Or to lose a limb For trying to obtain that knowledge Or the use of a pen and paper Can you feel it? How would it feel To finally be free But to then realize that it’s only a false freedom (Physically free to leave your imprisonment, but continuing to be mentally enslaved) Because you pay your fare at the front But you end up in the back And you have ghosts inflaming Crosses at the front of your home And Jim Crow’s in town for a while So you have to be hospitable And use separate bathrooms to Seclude you from your Fellow human beings that just Happen to be of another color, of a different race And you have to go through the back door Never able to make eye contact Always having to hide your face? To be called COON, MONKEY, NIGGER! And still being enslaved in a sense feel that You must accept this treatment as life And as law? To watch your house burning up in flames Or to be taken from your home by men in white sheets And have a noose adorning your neck And hung, feet dangling from a tree Like a Christmas ornament until the Very breath of life Abandons your body? Do you like it? How would it feel To finally have a change take place To be able to drink from the forbidden fountains To use that bathroom And then discover that AGAIN These gestures of equality Are symbolic of false equality? You are educated but can’t find work Or you have a career that allows you To be able to afford a beautiful home Only to be chased out by the more Subtle white supremacists And then your labeled, Stereotyped as a CRIMINAL DRUG PUSHER Women clutch their purses upon Sight of you Or transfer to the other side of the street Labeled guilty for a crime You didn’t commit Because of the stereotype that Persons of your ethnic background Are prone to do those things? (Besides they think you all look alike anyway) I ask you can you accept it? Well we’ve experienced this all We’ve been enslaved and oppressed Degraded and mistreated Murdered and raped We’ve endured the false freedom The false equality The false acceptance And the false promises………. Because dammit! I’m still waiting for my forty and a mule! |