And stil… We’ve been here before!

This isn’t new. We’ve been at this for a very long time. Longer than I or even my mother has been on this earth in that case! We are Black men, women and children. We fought the good fight just like those who wish to suppress us. In fact, We fought alongside them only to be rewarded with a lack of respect and rights from our equals. I’ve always been very vocal about our history and our people and I always will be! But now, I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been on social media more often or that I’m getting older and death gets closer; but now it just hits different. The death of our loved ones, mentors and role models hurt on a drastically different level. We have to fight a civil war with our own people just to come back and be at war with our entire country. All We ask for is our just due, both sympathy and empathy. Our people are hurting and have been hurting for decades because of the hand We didn’t ask to be dealt. They injected us with diseases and put drugs in our communities just to come back and take what was left of it from right beneath our feet. That pain runs so deep and We tried to tell you, America, time and time again how We felt. But still to this day, long after Tubman, King, X, Garvey, Douglass and Parks, our country still doesn’t get the picture. We were forced to show you the face of a 14-year-old boy who was brutally murdered by a couple of white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman only to find out that her story was a lie. We showed the world his face which should’ve been a closed casket just so you could feel our pain and yet you still chose to allow those men to walk away free. We had to witness a man that was beaten within an inch of his life on camera by the same people who were put in place to protect us. Fast forward thirty years later and We still see those same people take the lives of countless unarmed and innocent men, women and children. We continue to watch our families murdered unlawfully as our country sits there and literally does nothing! All We want and  have been wanting is fairness, equal opportunity and to just simply matter. Unfortunately, that seems to be too much for the country to bear. The “land of the free” is a joke and on top of that, when We kneel to take a stance for ourselves because no one else will stand for us, it offends the same ones We fought wars with. We literally risked our lives for a country that could care less if We were here or not! This is why We are hurt. But as I sit here and write this, one thing that they could never take away from us is our faith, our spirit and our willingness to fight. So even if this fight puts us a little bit closer to justice, We will always do what We have to do as a race, a community and a family to make sure We get our just due!