We pledge allegiance . .
I imagine it won’t be anytime soon, as
many of us are still captivated and caught
up in a red, white, and blue swoon, but at
some juncture, we have to cease
hemorrhaging our gifts and talents to
others for their own benefit. That levee
needs to be fixed, and those natural
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We go hard for America. We abandoned
our own culture for America, to have it
replaced with one they felt would make us
better slaves, I mean, better Americans,
who just happened to be slaves. We fought
in numerous unwarranted, unjustified,
elitism, and capitalism-fueled wars to
solidify our identities as blue-blooded
Americans. We adopted and adapted to
their education systems, allowing America
to reprogram us into humans much unlike
our true essence. We participate in their
politics, and their policies proved a bit
more than problematic for us, election
after election, hope kept alive, in God we
trust. We’ve tried. We dribble, toss, and
catch pigskins that garner billions for
owners and sponsors, but those Black
bodies who enable these sports leagues to
make riches, are treated like apolitical,
asocial bitches, muted. We abide by
uneven laws of justice to be unjustifiably
locked up in prisons where there are just
us. We gain employment per that
integration package, just to become
corporate stiffs forever chasing crumbs as
compensation, calendar watching for next
vacations. We’re in rat races we’re not set
up to win, autonomous communities of us
blown up and in the wind, no longer
focused on our own independence again.
Nope, we’re content to simply be
American. Becoming embraced as fellow
Americans seems to be our forever goal, as
our athletes travel to exploited nations of
our own, chasing gold.
The “African-American” athlete comes
back to America a temporarily glorified
pawn to be exploited for profits by
companies owned by others. The
African-American athlete amasses a bit of
fame and a small fortune to become the
fake symbolism that conveys to the
struggling Black masses that all is well,
that we’ve all made it. That is, until that
athlete raises a right fist, or decides to run
down a list of transgressions this country
has done to us. That gold medal
African-American athlete is a shining star
among forty-nine others and
accompanying stripes until that
African-American golden boy or girl flips
the script and decides to acknowledge the
Africans who gave birth to that prowess,
but whom remain powerless. America will
place that athlete on a pedestal until that
athlete climbs back down and decides not
to play impotent puppet. We tend to
forget Muhammad Ali was a gold
garnering American Olympic athlete,
however, he became hated and scorned
once America realized he was more about
us than them. He could SEE, and spoke
often about what he saw. One of America’s
greatest heroes was hated by America
until he was buried. A dead Black hero is a
great American one.