WINNING YOUR RACE: a manifesto of my own
To you who uphold the stories they told, because it’s you who are nearing the end, I am sorry you believed such a conniving, pathetic lie. Sorry you’re one of the unlucky ones. You would have done well in a different timeline. Down south, they really believed in happy slaves and a time bygone with the wind. In erasing my history, whether purposely, or by turning a blind eye, or by only uplifting that which you deemed most important, you have sealed your story. I don’t care. To me, you are a myth. An androgynous form wrapped around the leg of lady liberty. Or is that Zeus? We recall in pieces and imagination, not because of spite, but because of you. Even your official truths are a lie. All you are is the residue of a grandiose scam hidden in a game rigged in your favor. Flames burned cities and deferred dreams melted. Beasts of your ilk flooded entire towns, and the promised land washed away. The “lazy ones” were told to pull ourselves up by some mythical bootstraps and “move along.” But this is the new age of enlightenment. Discoveries are the fresh topsoil caressing seeds to words into the air. They speak to yours and say, “You own none of this land here. None of our loyalties. None of our music. None of our mysteries. You don’t own us.” They gasp, desperately trying to uphold the life you believed fiercely, as it slips away & the children of your children convince themselves they’ve become the hunted. Now they run.
To the pretend friend, you should know it is done. You don't need to understand the plight of my people. I no longer believe you could someday have sympathies for our tragedies, or empathy for those who support our equality. It’s too far, it’s too gone. You’ve made it clear you will never walk in my shoes or otherwise endanger your safety net. For you to step out of your perfectly crafted bubble would mean revealing the true nature of the deep-seated, greedy, inhumane hate embedded in the system you proudly uphold. Opening the blinds for all to see would collide detrimentally with the perception you put forth. Eventually, it would crumble your existence. To think you’d gamble with that has been an unhealthy expectation woven through my life. It serves me no more. What you owe, you’ve given away, while we were navigating your last solution. There’s nothing else. You will no longer pick our heroes, our allies, and our enemies. Your double speak has no more power. You who break worlds apart, from sea to shining sea, reducing people to crumbs only to throw those same crumbs in reverse, calling it a gift, with a smile. I smile back. I see you.
To you who had every opportunity to change the world but failed, I relinquish my invitation and access. I will not engage to understand your position. You have no intention of acknowledging what was done and what it did. You will fight to suppress it with the same energy you use to keep alive the dehumanization, & demonization of anything and everything Black. I’ve seen you resolve poverty, broken homes and unemployment as something we do to ourselves. That’s why we deserved to be killed. It’s the “things we do” and “it’s the way we are.” You, with your karmas and your hypocrisies. You think your children should inherit businesses & estates while ours should inherit debt & broken identities, but don’t believe you use your white privilege to not believe in white privilege. To you, equality means oppression. It’s just a big joke. You’ve made it all an internet meme of out-of-context “Black on Black crime” stats and reminders that it’s “Ok to be White,” the total rejection of reality. I don’t think you’ll come back. The acceptance of truth is an extremely long road, especially walking it blind. Someone would have to show you the way and backwards is the wrong direction for me. Being sick of you has brought me dangerously close to ending my belief that good will prevail. That’s energy I won’t spend on you, the same tired, self-righteous tool they have always used to make up the middle. Not a master, not a servant with nothing to lose or win, you’ll just keep running a loop that ends exactly where it began.
To the tricks of the law and all of its enforcers, I don’t trust you with my children, or their Father, not with my brothers, with my Mother, or me. You shoot because you fear for your life, yet you coddle every phobia except the one that is us. There’s never been a time in my life where you weren’t there to incarcerate friends or watch them die, a time where addiction and homelessness weren’t present somewhere close to my heart, and where instability wasn’t just on the other side of my people’s livelihood. I know if you wanted to stop that, you would have. I’ve watched you do it for your own civil liberties. One can conclude only that you consider us outside of your civilization. That’s actually ok. Please just leave us alone.We don’t need you to count or distribute our money, control how our health is managed, or measure our worthiness by your standards. We don’t need your policies or elections. We won’t be voting yes on guns you won’t let us own, or to improve schools our kids can’t attend. We don’t need your approval or validation. We are confident in our abilities to build a thriving community. But you know that.
America is not yours. I won’t allow her to be both the opportunity to thrive and the threat outside of my door. A beautiful plant, with poisonous roots. I can’t belong to her, but she hates me too. It’s not her fault the People have struggled to love a life that doesn’t look like them, to share, and let people live. You will never again put us in a race we don’t even know we are running. I’ll be here, this time on level ground, writing my own rules.
I win. You lost. Me.
