I can’t go back!
I can’t go back to a period in the past that brings back memories, puts a smile on my face and makes me nostalgic.
Black history for the past 500 years has no good memories for me or my ancestors to look back on and wish we could be there.
I believe there was a time black people were free from oppression, from racism, from violence and subjugation.
I don’t know that time. I have not experienced it nor has my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother and so on.
I’ve been born into pain!
Pain that has been inflicted upon my ancestors and me. The pain I never asked for nor wanted but had no choice but to accept.
I silently howl at the unfairness of it all and I am told to pull myself together.
I have no heroes besides one’s that have been murdered or incarcerated.
The struggles of my life are generational but I am told it’s because I am lazy as my forefathers were. I don’t see laziness but a life of struggle. An existence that has been mapped out for me when I was not even a thought.
How many of my forefathers cried and shouted to the universe for answers?
How many fought and died so I could live a life of freedom?
Do I tell them their death was in vain?
That the freedom they envisaged for me has not happened?
In my next life, I want to be an animal. Maybe a whale, a bird or a rhino! Because so much money and effort are given towards ensuring they’re ok.
If I was an animal I would be looked at kindly. If I was an animal I would be accepted and loved. And people would be kinder to people who look like me.
I am not an animal though, I am human and as human, I can see children dying from wars and poverty and neglect but those children do not evoke the amount of sympathy that a hurt animal does.
I don’t like this world!
My ancestors do not belong to this world of hate and avarice.
I want to build another world!
A world where black and brown children can move about freely with no fear of being harassed, with no comments being made about their hair, their accent or their looks. Where they can run around safe in the knowledge that how they look is ok.
I want a world where there is no reason ever to validate our existence.
Where people don’t underpay us and take advantage of our niceness. Where there are no more “accidental” shootings of our people. Where the mere sight of us stirs so much hatred and bigotry.
Where an impenetrable, invisible bubble surrounds us as we walk, work, socialize, worship and just exist.
I want a world where we aren’t looked at as if there was a fault in our stars when we were born.
