BRING OUR COMRADE SISTAS BACK FORWARD* (2022)

Who taught us

To reject love for our daughters

Our sisters

And mothers?

Yeah brothers

Done lost they minds

Remember the time

When we was Black and proud

Now we just Black and loud

Rapping about nothing

Pretending to be tough and

Internalizing self hate

Accepted self inflicted genocide as our fate

How much shit have we taken?

Reduced to booty shakin’

The solution?

Bring our Comrade sistas back forward…

For revolution!

White supremacist beauty standards

Got Black self esteem damaged

Baby girls’ hair fried

Relaxed and dyed

It’s all the rage

Till they bald in middle age

Taught to be ashamed of their texture

Wanna look like anyone except a

Natural born sista

They gone mad with the

Weaves, wigs and wraps

Burned scalps

Kathleen Cleaver once spoke

It won’t a joke

On the way

Back in the day

Sistas wore their natural hair

So white folks styled theirs

Just like fros

On TV in movies onstage at rock shows

We’ve reversed course from back then

Inferiority complexes done set back in

Now we waste billions to wear

Poor Asian women’s hair

To ape the Kardashian part-down-the-middle hairstyle

Meanwhile

Kim carved her body to look like a Black woman chile

Please bring our Comrade sistas back forward!

Generation and gender gaps

Our young males catching caps

Overflowing jails and prisons cells

Modern plantations

Not just for free labor

But aimed at

Our extermination

Where we can’t procreate

To decrease our birth rate

And we still can’t relate

Refusing to see the obvious

Us played against us

Willie Lynch was a myth

But the method is real how we rift

Day in day out

Clout is all we care about

Reduced to obsessions

Over appearances and possessions

Toys and tokens

And pathological need of ego stroking

We lost our communities

We’re lost without unity

We gotta bring our Comrade sistas back forward!

What happened to

All power to the people?

Yeah people we need to

Return to the source

Our revolutionary discourse

Few knew of course

The Black Panther Party

Was a woman-led force

For freedom

To serve the people and feed them

An entire organization of comrade sistas

Even the misters

Admitted they was bad!

Pigs declared them the greatest domestic threat

Attacked them with everything they had

Now we not free

Just numb

Feeling free to be dumb

How far have we come?

Two steps forward three back

Ashamed to be Black

We need comrades

Not queens

It seems

We forget

Monarchs were enslavers

Not saviors

Even in Kemet

We need our Comrade sistas brought back

FORWARD!

Integrate the system?

Become CEOs and pig politicians?

The same types

Of parasites

That made us slaves

Today they pushing us into prisons and early graves

It’s just like Apartheid

White supremacy trains

Black pigs to shoot is down at the barricades

Dark faces token Obamas

In high places to woo baby mamas

Pimping our losses Ben Crumps

Settling lawsuits to protect killer cops and get rich

Black versions of Donald Trump

Political bait and switch

Snitches like Al Sharpton telling civil rights lies

And democratic coalitions devised

To dismiss us with empty gestures

Co-opt us with

Empty feel-good lectures

To get us OFF THE STREETS

Cast votes?

No! Liberate the ground under your feet

Serve the people where we live

With programs devised to give

What we need to get free

Call the shots

Dismantle the rich man’s political plots

We need Panther Vision

Revolutionary Intercommunalism

A movement to empower the people

Led by working class women

Not to feminize capitalism

Nor polarize like feminism

But to unify and distribute power equally

Under socialism

With our Comrade sistas back forward!

Stop programming Black children

To live in

Terror with “The talk”

Revive the courage to patrol the pigs

Like Assats Shakur taught us to walk

Ten toes down for freedom

Heads held high

We have nothing to fear if we unify

Like the Civil War

It wasn’t Lincoln’s proclamation

We took up arms united fought and won our own emancipation

Problem was it took a racist politician

To give us permission

But a comrade sista lit the way

What did Harriet Tubman say?

Go free or die!

Go free or die!

Together we can get free if we but try

How indeed have we survived our ordeals?

While many who suffered far less have heeled

What’s the glue that’s kept us bonded

All the way from the days of bondage

Grandmammas took up the slack

Whips cracked across their backs

At every turn racist rape attacks

They never stopped fighting back

But now we make them feel they lack

Let’s bring them ALL the way back

FORWARD!

____________

*Dedicated to Safiya Bukhari, Assata Shakur, Harriet Tubman, Winnie Mandela, Afeni Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver and all the comrade sistas of renown and of little mention who stood without comprise for the liberation of oppressed peoples.