Taught to imitate those
\nwho disparage and berate us
\nCall ourselves names
\nthey created to degrade us
\nPartner with those
\nwho defiled our wives and daughters
\nAs though we’re cleansed
\nby swimming in septic waters
\nWe’ve become remixes of their sickness…
\nso it seems
\nThe aims of our enslavers
\nhave now become our dreams
\nWe must be redeemed
\nregain our common-unity our social ethic
\nReclaim our own national culture
\nand protect it
\nHarriet Tubman said
\nThere were hundreds she’d saved
\nAnd she could have freed hundreds more
\nIf they only knew they were slaves
\nAs my eyes are projected inward
\nI’m struck dumb
\nBy the inhumanity
\nthe insanity we’ve become
\nReduced from creators of societies
\namong history’s greatest
\nTo clowns entertaining
\nthose who claim to hate us
\nTold we’re worth nothing
\nso we kill our own reflection
\nOur communities and children
\nleft with no protection no direction
\nSwallowing lies told to the world of
\nour equal status
\nStill held at the bottom
\nwhere our lives have never mattered
\nHave we no dignity no esteem
\nno love of self
\nSo we admire aspire
\nto be anyone else
\nAnything that reflects our image
\nwe hate
\nWe even glorify Italian gangstas
\nAs long as its European we think its great
\nAbandon our youth to groups
\nthat compete like sewer rats
\nWho think respect is reflected
\nby tats and gats
\nSlaughtered by those
\nsworn to serve and protect
\nWho pit us to war with ourselves
\ndo we forget
\nThese police agencies destroyed
\nour power movements
\nThey studied our strengths and weaknesses
\nand now they use it
\nTo wipe away
\neven the thought of emancipation
\nTrick us to believe a shopping spree
\nis liberation
\nNeo-colonized by traitors
\ndisguised in dark skin
\nOverseers more brutal
\nthan the rich white men
\nWhom they serve
\nto keep the rest of us in line
\nBought off with puppet status
\nextra crumbs and cheap wine
\nWith feminist appeals
\nour women isolate us
\nA thousand schemes crafted
\nto separate us make them hate us
\nOur males imprisoned
\nour women told they don’t need us
\nThe forgotten source of our survival
\nnow they don’t even see us
\nUntil we make the break
\nreinstate another wave
\nOf education for liberation
\nwe’ll never know we’re still enslaved
\nWe must erase the clutter
\nall the imperialist lies
\nThat exclude and mis-define us
\nnormalize being colonized
\nUnite with others
\nsimilarly oppressed
\nShared class not skin tones
\nmust be the litmus test
\nIn uniting with real friends
\nagainst real foes and defeat
\nOur ongoing enslavement
\nfree the ground beneath our feet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taught to imitate those who disparage and berate us Call ourselves names they created to degrade us Partner with those who defiled our wives and daughters As though we’re cleansed by swimming in septic waters We’ve become remixes of their sickness… so it seems The aims of our enslavers have …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-4133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4134,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4133\/revisions\/4134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}