Don’t Call It Freedom If You Ain’t Never Took the Chains Off
The keys must feel so incredibly heavy in your hands, rusting away while I still bear the weighted shackles of my ancestors’ dreams of freedom.
They dreamed of an era of equity, not one of equality. Equality died when Sherman’s promise of 40 acres and a mule was ripped out from under our freshly freed hands, still raw and cracked with wounds of rebellion. The concept of equality rings uncomfortably in the ears of those who’ve heard it said as “separate but equal.” Who’ve heard it said as “not in my backyard,” or “not in my family” or “they’re just not a good fit.”
Equality was when we understood the aggression and the needless anger and the irrevocably, unmoving lack of opportunities within their communities. So, we tried building generational wealth from the blasted heath of stolen hours, days, and lifetimes.
In Opelousas, Louisiana, we tried to be equally educated. Instead, we grabbed our teacher out from under a fury of fists, freed his life and, the 27 of us who saved him, were captured and executed like rabid animals. Within two weeks, thousands of those misled by some insufficient feeling of supremacy hunted us down as we cried out for help. Over 200 voices were silenced in the thick air of violence.
My family is buried in Opelousas.
In Springfield, Illinois, we tried to be equally entrepreneurial. Instead, 40 of our hard-earned homes went up in a howling blaze of hatred, our blooming businesses burned to nothingness, and, as the dew settled in the morning after a night of terror, the lynching trees were scavenged by animals ready to sell our pain as souvenirs.
Have you seen their smiling faces next to these hanging cases?
In Elaine, Arkansas, we tried to equally fight for our workers’ rights as sharecroppers. Instead, we were rounded up indiscriminately with mother’s screaming, father’s heaving, children pleading upwards for anybody, anybody to save us. God, please help us! After the last bullet was fired, over 200 black, bloodied, bruised, sullied, bodies lay on the ground, their dreams evaporating as quickly as their cold, dead sweat.
Today, 155 years ago, in the deep, sour belly of Texas, my family was made into sharecroppers.
It’s been 155 years and my parents barely escaped the claws of economic decimation that has entrenched so many of us. It’s been 155 years since several falsities in the name of “equality” have been enacted as negligent policies. It’s been 155 years and just now my family might possibly accrue generational wealth under “equal” measures, but it’s too late.
It’s too late for equality because it’s never been given.
With every twitching body struggling against a coarse rope until the last, red gurgles of air dies on its lips, generational wealth dies. With every intelligent mind deemed unreachable or unteachable, generational wealth dies. With every soul sitting behind steel for having the wrong depth of melanin, generational wealth dies. With every hard-working, entrepreneurial spirit crushed by the inability to get a seat at the table, generational wealth dies.
So, no. There is no equality. And now, there’s no use for me to sit at the table stained with my ancestors’ blood. I don’t want that table. I want to destroy it, destroying the system that built it because it was a system built to destroy me. We must summon the strength, the strength I’m almost too tired to give, to craft a new table with my scarred, bitter hands. And you have to do it with me.
Because there’s no such thing as trickle-down economics but there is such a thing as trickle-down privilege.
We cannot build this table if I’m still shackled by the woes of the fallen. We cannot build this table with the bondage of voter suppression and a prison industrial complex killing generation upon generation of aspirations. We cannot build this table while we get turned away for having the “wrong name” or going to the “wrong college” which just so happens to be historically black, or not being your best friend or daughter or brother or country club member. We cannot build this table when student debt ravages black women more than any other demographic. We cannot build this table while gentrification burns through our communities, echoing the blaze of Springfield.
We will not build a table only to have it burned down in the shadows of repeated history. This will be a new table, able to carry the weight of heinous history buried between the lines of textbooks. I’m ready to build my table, our table.
But first, please take these chains off of me.
