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