Don’t tell me to ‘get over it’ because it makes YOU uncomfortable,
The founding of a nation on blood and chains should make you uncomfortable!
And though the institutions no longer exist, the attitudes of slavemasters yet prevail,
Freely and proudly expressed!
So be it, but let this be too: the history of my ancestry DOES NOT BEGIN with bondage,
but the history of my ancestry HERE does, and so I will celebrate the TRIUMPH of their SURVIVAL, so that
I might sit here today and use this machine to type these words:
You will no longer brand me ‘animal’
or grind my dignity under your heel.
You will have no access to my joy
And I reject your invective as the source of my sorrows.
I do not seek your approval to grow and thrive and be.
I have no master in you, and you have no servant in me.
I will be free, in spite of, not because of, your documents that proclaim the very liberty for all men
you’ve revealed to be a lie.
You don’t get to define me, if you don’t want to know me.
You don’t get to classify me, when you don’t want to live next to me.
You don’t get to objectify me, because I am not here to amuse you.
You don’t get to nullify me, and say I shouldn’t be here: WE are the nation’s only IMPORTED immigrant.
I will not get over the chains I’ve never worn, not get over the whippings, lynchings, beatings, rapes, torture, castrations, hunting hounds and K9 cops, bombings, hoses, “Colored” signs, white robes, shotguns, fires, burning crosses, burning bodies hanging from trees and bridges and tossed in rivers, broken and dismembered, and soil soaked in blood and lost years behind bars from false accusations I’ve never experienced, because I stand on the remains of all the rubble and remains of those lives; they are yet a part of me, and whether or not you “understand” it, it is nevertheless so.
And so I say again: I am FREE
but I, and my children, and their children
will not EVER
‘get over it.’
Beyond Panic 