Can You Learn Your History?

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Can you learn your history? You know, the history in which interracial marriage was banned, LGBT+ and pagans were burned and hung by evangelical Christians, Black people were lynched for...existing or something, slavery was legal and enforced, women couldn't vote, segregation was legal and enforced, Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps, neurodiversity was just "laziness", and everybody except for rich straight cis white Christian able-bodied neurotypical men was (and still are) systematically dehumanized?

 

Can you learn your history? The history that has continued today, in which a woman's worth is contained in her uterus and her relation to men, five transgender women of color have been murdered in 2015 alone, unarmed unsuspecting Black men are shot by racist police officers and then denied justice, Christian values dominate a government which is supposed to be religiously neutral, Black women are told that their natural hair is unprofessional and ugly, proms can still be segregated, intersex children are operated on without consent, queer couples can be denied service in restaurants, teenagers can be proselytized while on public school property, women are expected to be sexy but punished for being sexual, LGBT+ rights are compared to bestiality, and oppressed minorities are told they are bullying the people of a country which claims they are free but doesn't treat them that way?

 

Oh, yeah, we have freedom of speech. But if it hadn't been for social justice, for Malcom X, for Rosa Parks, for Harriet Tubman, for Harvey Milk, for Alice Paul, for Lucy Burns, for Sojourner Truth, for Cesar Chavez, for Rosa Parks, for the Brown Berets, for the Black Panthers, for the Underground Railroad, that free speech and equality that you benefit so much from would be denied to anyone who dared to speak out against injustice.

 

Can you learn your history?
This poem is about: 
My country
Our world

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