A Note To America

America, you seem concerned that there are kids that are being killed in Black communities, and you talk about “Black on Black” crime (which really is just indicative of where people live and the groups they live with). I mean, Black people don’t travel around to hunt other Blacks.

But I digress: Basically, you are asking yourself why should you care if Black people don’t care. Which, by the way, is extremely offensive. Of course we care about ourselves. But until you live like the people you judge, and experience what they deal with, and until you know what communities are doing to protect the young and to invest in the youth … until you realize that crime in Black neighborhoods is about survival (America, you taught us that), you have to question what you think you know.

America, you can’t develop a system of oppression and then expect people not to act in the way that they have been shaped to act. You can’t segregate, defund communities, create obstacle after obstacle around employment, housing, and schooling, and make neighborhoods ghettos — and then walk away from the ghetto you created except for making sure it’s policed.

America, you created a world where people would kill each other in order to survive, and where most people have to decide that it’s me or you. You created a world where for us to be able to live and to feed our families, we were faced with opposing our own.

America, you created a system (read The Color of Law) that would keep a “knee on our neck” from day one. You created thugs. You created addicts. You created hopelessness, and you continue that agenda today.

America, you created a world where we are unsafe, unseen and unwanted.

Every time you look at someone that is Black as inferior and less than … guess what? America, you did that. When someone doesn’t know how to move forward in life because of their skin color, guess what? America, you did that. Black people were enslaved, oppressed, they were subject to whatever they were given and whatever happened to them. You made us slaves, beaten, raped, and belittled.

America, you created the slave mentality that you can’t stand. You did that.

So, America, your actions have repercussions. You made what you made. You created the protesters, you created the riots, you created this climate.

It’s like every movie where the mad scientist creates something to control, and then when it is out of control, everyone suffers. No one has compassion on those that were experimented with; they just want it gone, so that they don’t have to fear what was created anymore.

So each and every person in America should be outraged that this is where we are. Each and every person should be standing tall on behalf of one another, saying that we all deserve better than this.

Because this is America.