The Reclaimed Heart: Commemorate
I usually have back stories about the poems I write but this one is a little different.
To be completely honest, I don't know where this poem came from, but I felt compelled to write it.
Let me start by saying this: to be Black in America is to be caught in a web of rage, sadness, and loss, all of which are not our own, some is. But most if it is inherited from centuries of slavery, rape, terrorism, violence, oppression, bigotry, and hatred.
It seems to be the trend as of late to assault people of color with racism, whether it's the teacher who sent their students home with an assignment to find 3 good reasons for slavery to the lynched black baby dolls found on university campuses across the nation to the high school cheer leaders and the college sorority girl caught on social media chanting the N-word and hate speech to the little bi-racial child who was left hanging from a tree by 3 white kids who thought it was funny, we have a serious problem that outrage won't fix and ignoring it won't heal.
For the people of the African diaspora, it all begins with the middle passage. We have all seen pictures of people hunted like prize game, chained together, forced onto the lower decks of a ship like baggage, never seeing their homeland again.
So many never even made the journey, succumbing to disease from the disgusting conditions they were chained into, heartbreak from being stolen away, or because they would rather drown than be property. Those who did survive the squalid conditions were sold at auctions, naked and filthy and treated like 3/5ths of a human being, a legacy that continues even unto today.
Until America and her people reckon with the irreversible, irreconcilable damage they were party of for an entire people, until her people recognize that this country would not be all it is without the abduction of , the sale of , the labor of the children of the African diaspora, until America finds and comes to terms with one of its most egregious sins, I am not sure we will ever truly be the United States.
I am not sure if this is the final piece, there may be more within me about this. Here is this week's Reclaimed Heart piece: Commemorate.
To be completely honest, I don't know where this poem came from, but I felt compelled to write it.
Let me start by saying this: to be Black in America is to be caught in a web of rage, sadness, and loss, all of which are not our own, some is. But most if it is inherited from centuries of slavery, rape, terrorism, violence, oppression, bigotry, and hatred.
It seems to be the trend as of late to assault people of color with racism, whether it's the teacher who sent their students home with an assignment to find 3 good reasons for slavery to the lynched black baby dolls found on university campuses across the nation to the high school cheer leaders and the college sorority girl caught on social media chanting the N-word and hate speech to the little bi-racial child who was left hanging from a tree by 3 white kids who thought it was funny, we have a serious problem that outrage won't fix and ignoring it won't heal.
For the people of the African diaspora, it all begins with the middle passage. We have all seen pictures of people hunted like prize game, chained together, forced onto the lower decks of a ship like baggage, never seeing their homeland again.
So many never even made the journey, succumbing to disease from the disgusting conditions they were chained into, heartbreak from being stolen away, or because they would rather drown than be property. Those who did survive the squalid conditions were sold at auctions, naked and filthy and treated like 3/5ths of a human being, a legacy that continues even unto today.
Until America and her people reckon with the irreversible, irreconcilable damage they were party of for an entire people, until her people recognize that this country would not be all it is without the abduction of , the sale of , the labor of the children of the African diaspora, until America finds and comes to terms with one of its most egregious sins, I am not sure we will ever truly be the United States.
I am not sure if this is the final piece, there may be more within me about this. Here is this week's Reclaimed Heart piece: Commemorate.
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