Happy Black History Month

With fear buried deep in your belly you pretend you are strong and brave, but it’s not true. You are five years old without a parent and in a strange place. You wander frantically, looking for any sign of calm or peace, but You fail epically. With swollen eyes you weep, but no one understands the anxiety, the uneasiness of dry tears, the sadness in your soul. 

“Help me,” goes unanswered. “Please” is synonymous with lazy. Your language is foreign. You are beyond afraid and you are alone in your exposure.

You are Black in a world that knows Black is expendable. And so it goes. Your children’s children, the two generations before them, and the three before you are well into the digestive process of self-loathing. The stomach acids have made second class citizenry a comfort food for you. 

You exist in a fog that allows you to remain quiet while your children are clothed in garments sewn with ahistorical lies. These same children, your children, are murdered because of DNA you invested in them, and you are rendered powerless because you diet on passivity. They die in vain, and worst still, some of you gift the families of these deceased kids’ with blame. 

Far too many are now an addict of this dirty opiate. The hateful side effects have been normalized by media outlets, political allies, schools and churches that profit from delivering you and your community as zombies, doped up on reversed-ethnocentrism. No surprise the prolonged use of this drug has begun to take its toll. It’s most noticeable in our youth and their willingness to believe that their value is based on becoming something equal to White. 

Lest you forget, Turner hung to be your foot stool. Garvey’s ships anchored dreams. Malcolm spoke that you might scream.  Fannie’s fatigue laid the foundation of your rest. And, in Elaine they led so you would know courage when you see it.

Let no other day pass while the United States of America calls itself the leader of the free world yet holds your freedom hostage. Make them accountable. Take what is your grandmothers’, your grandfathers’. Equality has never been given for it requires the oppressor to admit his wrongs. Stand up straight, Black people, and say to this country that you built: there is one way forward and it is together as one people.

Happy Black History Month 
By: Mondale Robinson