Raise The Roof

[Spoken: Staceyann Chin] It must be in the fucking water Being force-fed to the police, the prosecutor And the politicians who care nothing for Black bodies Falling like leaves in late August In Ferguson, in Cleveland, in Staten Island Only minutes away from where my own child sits Watching "The Muppets Take Over Manhattan" I am aching complicit, indulgently nursing an October heartbreak While the world crumbles insensible, inexplicable in November It is now Decеmber and the world has lost its fucking mind Christmas trees being еrected like dicks Amidst the groundswell of Bil Cosby accusers Coming out of the closet of secrecy Synchronizing with stories about frat boys growing up rapists All this as the national justice system wraps up cases In pretty colored presentations to grand juries Who collectively refuse to indict murderers captured on video Freed by unpopular opinions that trump the overwhelming evidence Available to anyone with a cellular phone I am holding my own sorrow back from my own child Born Black in a country in which her brown body does not matter To anyone with any power I am watching these videos over and over again The helpless bile rising angry in my chest I am not feeling forgiving It is time for these oppressors to turn their fucking cheek to the public victims All these accounts of these killings reek of racism These events mount a war against the poor This is not a fucking video game These men who are killed are not dominoes These dead boys belonged to people who now mourn them without closure, without a day in court We are moving backward through history Foolish as it might've been, we the people had swallowed the fallacy that trumpeted the end of a time When Black mothers who lost children to white arrogance had no recourse yhat shameful time, that supposedly ended when Emmett Till, when Herbert Lee, when Medgar Evers when Harriette Moore, when Malcolm X Back then, there was no hypocrisy about the system being stacked against anyone with a smidgen of melanin staining the history of their skin Fifty years later we must continue to raise our resources to protest the blatant lies littering Black people's experiences with the law We are not protected by it This is not what we voted for when we voted for our first Black president This is not what freedom fighters hoped for when they marched against segregation in Selma, in Chicago This is not the dream Dr. Martin Luther King spoke about in Washington, D.C Almost a decade and a half into the 21st century Race relations in America is still a fucking cauldron bubbling angry Under the ugly swirl of Black despair and a lack of white accountability Parading as a penal system, in which forty percent of those incarcerated Come from a group which only consists of 12% of the entire fucking population With numbers like that, what good does it do me to comply with those in uniform? I am shot at 12 years old for waving a toy gun you sell to me every Christmas Wrestled to the ground for breaking up a fight because You suspect me of selling loose cigarettes Put in an illegal chokehold because I dare to ask why The whole incident filmed for my family to watch my death played out on primetime TV, the public angle assuaged by the assumption that justice has to eventually come My death must mean something more than a footnote in media frenzy of our time I am owed something for having been violated by a system sworn to protect me My name is Trayvon Martin My name is Tamir Rice My daughter is Michael Brown Your mother is Sean Bell Your father Yvette Smith Eleanor Bumpus could have been any one of us I am Amadou Diallo and Eric Garner is all of us This phenomenon is an invisible epidemic where the victims are forever silenced by state-sanctioned executions We have to find the courage to speak for them We must find the voice of resistance for ourselves For our children, for our children's children It is time to raise more than our eyebrows in protest It is time to put our bodies where our hopes lie This is not a moment to invoke the sweet by and by Now is a moment for action If there's any humanity left in you get up, stand up Join a fucking protest, pick up a fucking pen Write, scream, wail, march, meet, gather Plan, strategize, it is time to find a way to make them listen It is time to make the powers that be hear They need to see we are no longer complicit It's time to raise the roof on these motherfuckers It is time, it is time we raise the roof on these motherfuckers So they know we are never, ever going away