From “Taking Chances and Talking Freedom” by Emmanuel Fru Doh

From "Taking Chances and Talking Freedom"
by Emmanuel Fru Doh

You don't blame people for their pain
When you've never known anything like it,
Your table overflowing with the fruits of their labor,
Spewing garbage about a people being lazy
Just because your spoon at birth
Was golden from slave paint,
And daily repainted by cheap black labor
As the years roll on to maturity.

Earlier today (the day of this writing), I was tasked to give a definition for some buzz terms: reverse racism, white privilege, etc. etc. This poem wasn’t even a thought in my head when I opted on reverse racism.

REVERSE RACISM: (noun) A make believe concept because colonizers want to cosplay persecution.

White people (and even some BIPOC) will see the systemic issues and still blame people for their situations. The idea that they rose above it, while never actually be affected by it, is proof that pulling oneself by the boot straps works. Much like the boomer generation, they climbed the ladder of prosperity and burned it so no one else could follow after.

That’s what I took from Emmanuel Fru Doh’s “Taking Chances and Talking Freedom.” How white people and the top 1% will build the myth of the self-made man, but hide the broken backs of prosperity beneath the rug. The bones of the enslaved hidden in the foundations of empires, the blood of the indigenous spilled to fertilize the lands.

You can read the poem in Emmanuel Fru Doh’s In the Color of My Skin available on Kindle.