Black...

Image Source: Black Girls Nerds

© 27 August 2020, the Griot Poet 

Jacob Blake was shot in his back,

Guilty of no criminal act,

A throwaway knife found conveniently,

In the driver’s side of his SUV,

 

Tried to quell a domestic disturbance

Between two women before he got hurt,

The officers who tased, then shot him grabbed his shirt, as if

They had never heard of handcuffs.

 

Shot in the back seven times

Point blank range, as if

His name was Luke Cage,

With preternatural strength and bulletproof skin,

Mutagenic properties that don’t exist.

 

WE ARE TIRED OF THIS!

 

Doc Rivers shed tears for this country,

Who’s shone no love for our faithfulness,

In every war and skirmish,

Since the Revolution and Crispus Attucks,

 

The Milwaukee Bucks embodies this,

Boycotting the NBA playoff games,

WNBA, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the National Hockey League did the same,

Because they know the agency of their own bodies,

“40 Million Dollar Slaves” * throwing off the shackles of oligarch minstrelsy,

Addressing social inequities,

Despite - Jared Kushner - their salaries,

Showing 1968 Olympics Tommie Smith and John Carlos solidarity

(That by the way: need their Olympic Medals restored, expeditiously),

 

Before 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse prowled

With a long rifle in the streets,

Kenosha has a history,

Invested in the misery,

Of keeping its 11.2% African American descendants,

Of the Great Migration Exodus,

In their caste system assigned places,

Rittenhouse passed police spaces

Unchallenged in any fashion before capture.

 

The needle has swung rapidly

From OJ Simpson, Michael Jordan back to Muhammad Ali,

Who saw through the Vietnam War’s depravity,

We are not superheroes, supervillains, or

Other fantastical beings,

 

But fathers, sons, brothers, nephews, cousins

Mothers, daughters, cousins, nieces,

In Breonna Taylor’s case, the possibility of procreation shattered to pieces

In middle-of-the-night lead torrent birthed by

No-knock warrant,

Her Kentucky AG had more time

To speak at the RNC,

Than arrest the officers involved in this focused killing spree,

 

We are headed for a Christchurch, New Zealand fiasco,

Worse than Synagogue assassinations and El Paso Walmart machinations,

 

“Right-wing extremists were responsible for 2/3 terrorist attacks in 2019,

“And 90% in 2020,”

 

August 26, 2020

The fourth anniversary of Colin Kaepernick kneeling,

Before Ahmaud Aubrey’s execution for jogging,

Breonna Taylor’s execution for sleeping,

George Floyd’s asphyxiation-by-cop on his neck kneeling,

 

Two days before the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington,

 

Vladimir Putin has the American experiment reeling,

Pushing at fissures in the body politic to train wreck,

That’s long existed,

 

Reparations paid to former slave owners,

Their descendants owning professional plantation teams,

Playing in funded-by-taxpayers boondoggle schemes,

 

The descendants of slaves had to eat Jim Crow,

Segregation with hand-me-down books and missing pages,

Neighborhoods redlined into

Concentration camps

Also-known-as ghetto cages,

 

Where criminal activity is concentrated,

And summary executions could be committed

With impunity by state Gestapo before video evidence,

 

We’ve had that since Rodney King!

Before that, the newsreels of diverse young people

Hosed down, dog-bit and Billy-clubbed,

Hasn’t educated the ruling class of the United States to think anything less than sadistic actions

By their “police union,” un-qualified immunity factions

Wouldn’t be efficacious,

 

Four more years of this madness will not “make us great.”

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said,

 

Nor bring back white picket fence Levittown’s,

And their “suburban housewives” barefoot and pregnant, or

Ward and June Cleaver

Raising Wally and “Leave it to Beaver,”

 

While border agents use microwave “death rays.”

On migrants, fleeing conditions generated

By moribund U.S. policies,

 

“Black” and “white” is a projection,

Of judged depravity, and mythologized perfection,

Like shit hole countries and niggers,

James Baldwin figured

You needed us to be this,

Your bullshit is officially dismissed,

The dark hole smoldering coals for what remains of your souls,

Count on the powerless,

 

The 1% figure

A caste system needs pariahs,

Fear must be cast on brown bodies of Melanin,

Hispanics/Latinos, Migrants, Muslims, added in the mix,

Masking the smash-and-grab crime-in-progress

By the aforementioned 1%,

 

“Trickledown” is bullshit,

David Stockton admitted it,

Just like “law and order” since 1968,

That doesn’t even benefit

Those who share the 1%’s hue, or tint,

 

These are fears they use to manipulate,

The rural proletariat,

“Hate of the other,” is a false aphrodisiac,

That makes no one richer, or moves one up in class,

That Putin gives as perfumed, rancid farts

While Orange Satan sniffs his putrid ass,

 

E Pluribus Unum,

 

Far from “greatness,”

Martin Luther King said:

“We will either live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

 

THINK!

 

*40 Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete,” William C. Rhoden