A Letter To America

Am I a number to you?

Am I replaceable to you?

Am I unimportant,

Unequal,

Distasteful,

Even lower than an insect stuck on the bottom of your shoe?

Have you forgotten who created your country

Even though you say our kind is lazy

When you are the one who traveled all the way to our homeland

Ripped entire families apart like a herd of lamb

Just so you didn’t have to work with your own hands.

But we are lazy?

We who constantly fight for standard human equality?

We who learn at a young age to run from the bullets you fire

Making sure we never reach to the age that we can retire

And at the same time, you claim we have risen

Above things like issues due to racial difference.

Yet a white man’s version of the talk with his son

Has to do with a time in life when he feels he loves someone

While a black father must sit, his son down

And say “be careful when you go out and if they try to shoot you make sure to run.”

How can we call this progress?

 When from the time a black child is born it must digest

The fact that it still must work harder

For everything a white child gets.

It still must prove that it belongs

In a society that has proven that it wants you to be different

And yet by different it means that if your anything but white your wrong.

And we still turn a blind eye to the true problem

That a dead black child isn’t a statistic

And that a black parent going ballistic

Is not a racial deformity

But a human reaction that shows their humanity.

We need to stop saying that murder is a coincidence

Or a accident

Or making the excuse that it was a tragic misfortune.

How many of us do you have to kill,

To realize that you can’t break our will

Because you’re the one to taught us to be strong

That we may not be where we originally belonged

But when work together, and we work hard

We can even build America

Home of the free

Where white men think, they are God

But in reality

It is a white man’s fantasy

And us black people

Are the one who built it all

So obviously, our mental capacity

Can form a place where even we belong 

-Crystal Fahie