The Chain Gang by Dinah Hutson
The chains you often wore around your neck, are the chains
That were wrapped around your ancestors necks, arms, and legs
The hatred you wore so proud upon your neck was the same
Hatred that left your ancestors into bondage,
That left your great great great great grandmother in fear that her slave
Master would rape her again
It all started when darkened skin was put onto ships
Where diseases killed them all, put onto plantations where death was promised,
but until the cotton was picked the advantage took place, years and years of
Bondage, captivity bonding, communist seeking-democracy lacking
Illegal crimes
Emancipation Proclamation, 1863
The time in history when I thought the establishment of
Colorism,racism, and inequality would all be done
But I was wrong to think that moments in society where we took big
Steps were the moments that were tucked underneath our blood
Civil Rights Movement 1950-1960, a time in history where water fountains
Depressed the “colored” and held white privilege over the head and faces
Of what America is today
1790, Naturalization Act
1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford
The Renaissance, reformation, scientific theories, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland,
Emmett Till,
THE POWER OF AN ILLUSION
But today, oh today
Never had I thought the tables to turn
Never had I seen black on black crime,
Black on black hatred,
Black on black gentrification,
Black on black prisons,
Black girl raped, black boy killed
I’ve seen it all: tragedy, privilege,pain,life, death
We’ve spent so much time focusing on the trends, baby-phat, trash-rappers with no message, fast girls, fast boys
Not seeing the bigger picture
That this world’s damage
Goes beneath the ocean floor
That nothing can pull us back up
I realized that reality as bloods and crips killed family members of mine,
Never had we met
As there was a divide from dark skin people to light skin people
Curly hair from nappy hair, so ignorant that the hair that grew out of all our heads
Would not be here if we didn’t have those ancestral historical figures
To gives us those strands
I saw the reality when we as black girls were used as experiments
That ones that were used for the control variables and the ones
That were manipulated, I realized that the damage was so deep as the mornings
Where I woke up proud to be a colored woman
I was only proud that God gave me the ability to wake up
But for several moments something in me wished and thought to ask
Why couldn’t he just let me sleep forever?
Waking up a colored women, I felt the torture of the ones
Who suffered before me, I sensed the image of being accused of a crime I did not commit,
I felt insecure, I sensed the image of failing the paper brown bag
test, I had the senses of an image of being thrown onto a ship
Where the chain I saw the white men wearing
Was the same material and chain that held onto the legs, arms, and necks of those historical figures who fought like hell for the damage that has been done
To never appear throughout history, to never find its way killing adolescent hearts,
To prevent little girls from being made fun of because of their afros, to stop letting skin color become a preference
But something that everyone could uphold
I was a fool to think that the past could be valued instead of the present
That is belittled by the culture of all who wears the chains, choking their inner--self
Allowing for their hatred to unleash, letting their hatred follow the
History of sinking to the bottom of the ocean floor.