“Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
The lives of black folks are
hanging in the balance,
Between intrigue and fear,
Violence and tokenization,
Curiosity and suspicion,
Between being the face of
crime and being completely ignored,
Between living and dying.
Contrary to popular belief,
racism in the United States
has not ended,
We are not living in a
post-racial society,
Things are not better, they
are different.
Progress has been made,
But in an old dog system that
is finding
New and improved ways to get
away with old tricks,
Black lives will keep hanging in the balance.
Children may be growing up in
an age in which
They don’t believe it is impossible
for a black man to be the
president of the US,
But they will still grow up
with
history books that tell them
that
The Civil Rights Movement was
the beginning
of the decline of racism in
America,
And the election of Barack
Obama
was the final checkpoint.
They’ll learn that Martin
Luther King Jr.’s birthday is less
a celebration of his life and
radical work
Than it is a day off of
school
Seasoned with blissful
ignorance
about his politics and
ideologies
Beyond “I Have a Dream,”
Because making a holiday and
renaming schools and streets
in his honor
Is more important than
knowing who he really was.
If racism is over and MLK’s dreams
have come true,
How are black folks are still
getting
Hired less, paid less,
and being trusted less than white
folks?
What amount of ignorance and
complacency does it take
To make comfort and fear
adequate justification for
the continuation of
What the Civil Rights
Movement
and Obama’s election
supposedly fixed?
This post-racial society that
we allegedly live in is the
Same society that tells little
brown boys and girls that,
Even in pretend,
Disney fairytales aren’t made
for kids like them,
Where they’re told that they
look so much nicer when their
hair is straight,
Told how surprisingly
articulate
or not like the others they
are,
And are expected to be the
voice of
all black folks everywhere in
their classrooms,
Where any position or profession
they assume will be preceded by their race,
“black doctor,” “black
coworker,” “black friend,”
And every criminal and inmate
will be assumed to be black
before being revealed,
Often by the same people that
cry colorblindness,
Where they’ll be asked where
they are from
more often than
They will be asked who they
are,
what they do, and what they
think,
Or, in many cases,
brilliant black youth are
being written off and not
Really being taught by
anyone,
Being told that knowledge is
power and then
given no access to acquire
it.
If getting a good education
requires having money,
And having a lot of money
requires having a job that
pays well,
And having a job that pays
well
generally requires getting a
good education,
What surprises people about
dropout, unemployment, crime, and prison rates
In poor communities of color?
How can you obtain access to
resources to opportunities
that you’ve
Never been told existed for
you?
Few people climb gearless up
mountains they’ve never heard
of,
Especially if the tallest
thing they’ve been shown
is the view out of their
front doors.
Being told that we have to be
the
change we wish to see in the
world
Seems impossible in a place
Where fear of what could be
personally lost
Outweighs the empathy that
wants others to gain,
And where people from the
communities
That need change the most
Are being incarcerated,
discarded, and silenced
because their brown skin
makes them look an awful lot
like
the next accused criminal the
police are searching for.
From prison, you can’t pay or
vote your way into a better world.
While the police are fully
engaged in a stop and frisk,
Shoot now, think later
competition,
People are continuing to
master the turn away,
Cry while watching or reading
about it,
Post it to Facebook and
forget it ever happened
Approach to responding to
civil injustices,
And if they can’t be moved
because
This stuff doesn’t happen to
folks like them,
If they can’t imagine that
black youth on their screens
Shot to death by the people
that are
supposed to protect them
Being their friends,
siblings, cousins, or children,
I unfruitfully wish that
they’d be moved by the humanness,
By the fact that that dead
young person
is a loving, loved human
being
That is trying to make it
through just like everyone else.
Please, tell the families and
friends
of all of the strange fruit
showing up
In prison, in the media,
At bus stations, on the dark
walk home,
or those not being
acknowledged at all,
That racism no longer exists.
There are so many young
people of color
Who will never be given the
opportunity or option
To tell their stories and
recite their creations
In a place just like this in
front of a crowd just like yall,
because they are trapped in
poverty, prison, or graves,
All products of a perfectly
functioning,
Perfectly destructive system,
Where murder and self-defense
have different parameters
depending on the color of the
skin of those involved,
and where, if I didn’t know
better,
I’d be positive that the same
people
commenting in online forums
That the young men dying like
Trayvon Martin and Oscar
Grant
Deserve what came to them,
And wishing their Facebook
friends a
“Happy Dead Nigger Day” on
Martin Luther King Day
are the same people who gathered
in mass to watch
neighborhood lynchings and
Pay ten cents apiece for links
of the ropes
That hung innocent men in the
streets decades ago.
But they are different people
Living generations apart, in
the same mindset of
“if you aren’t white, you
aren’t human,
If you aren’t white, you
don’t deserve to live”
That, the more things change,
the more they remain the
same.
I can only be wary of those
who only condemn the past
And believe it is independent
of the present,
Who say that they can’t be
penalized
Because of the actions of
their ancestors,
Who refuse to be held
accountable for
Perpetuating and growing
comfortable
In an unjust system.
If we don’t think about the
past,
we won’t talk about the past,
And then we’ll repeat it,
remix it, and
Call it progress.
Things don’t change because
of time,
Things change because of
people,
As long as we live in a place
where people will defend their favorite celebrity,
Before they will lend a speck
of empathy to those who are
being oppressed and murdered
around them,
the same people who will
benefit most
if history repeats itself
will keep telling black folks
to ‘get over it,’
and will help maintain the
barriers that confine us,
calling what we fight for and
what we are angry about
‘fighting hate with hate’ or
‘reverse racism.’
The questions that people don’t
want the answers to
Are the ones that need to be
asked.
Why aren’t you angry?
Why was that joke so funny to
you?
Do we really live in a post-racial society?
We can’t fear the past,
We can’t ignore it.
We must learn together,
Grow together,
Love together,
And change together.
We can have and reach our
dreams,
Lift every voice and sing,
Knowing that
Our lives are worth far more
than the places
We’ve been left hanging, and
We shall overcome long before
we will forget.
“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the leaves to drop,
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Here is a strange and bitter
crop.”
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