Strange Fruit

“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,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.”