Do Not Look Away...

Don't turn away, look at this photo of human chattel tied and bound to one another in the bowel of a ship for months. Existing, surely not living, in fear. Not knowing where they were going. Not knowing who were their captors. Not knowing why they were being kidnapped. Not knowing what could possibly be their dispute with these barbaric "people" who were stealing them from their own land, taking them to God knew where...

For months during the middle passage as these innocent people were bound to one another and could not move, women had periods, everyone defecated and urinated, folks surely got sick being force fed food that was foreign to them by their foreign terrorists whose foreign tongue they did not understand... Women AND men were raped. Some women may have given birth to babies conceived before their kidnapping by men they loved or conceived with their rapist captors during their period of incarceration waiting for enough of their peers to be kidnapped to fill a ship to take the barbaric voyage to hell...

I can't say it often or loudly enough, if White folks (from all parts who were involved in the trade of humans as chattel), who expend much energy in weaving a story about how Black, Brown, Yellow and Native American folks are barbaric, less human, more criminal, lazy, shiftless, untrustworthy, etc., etc., etc. and who use media, history books, mass incarceration and other tactics to convince themselves and their offspring that they should be fearful of us, if only they knew or were willing to look in their own mirror to examine their own history, they would wonder why we, Black folks, Brown folks, Yellow folks, Native Americans and others, are not afraid of them. They would question whose story represents the epitome of heartless barbarity and never would they utter the words to anyone to, "get over it". They would have some understanding of that which they are telling others to get over... Never shall/should we forget or agree to "get over it"...

America, the land of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", wears boots that were laced, spit shined and whose soles were worn out by Black folks who were forced to wear those boots to build this country, who continue to build this country from inside prison walls still used to enslave and work us for free...

Look at this photo. Enlarge it. Scroll across it. Examine It. Experience it. 

Just Do Not Look Away...