…about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” +Zora Neal Hurston
This is America and anything you say or do can and will be used against you if you’re Black, other, or standing against the systemic isms. Take a look back at any organization, party, movement, or individual that dared take a stand against the status quo and you will see the termination of determination in the name of the American way. Just what is the American way? In consideration of the nature and method by which this country was established, the American way reads like a summer blockbuster; Espionage, massacres, war, rape, theft, bondage, and blood…so much blood. In reading from Safiya Bukhari’s viewpoint, from the working ranks of the Black Panther Party, it becomes painfully clear that if you refuse to flow with the program, or make any attempt to deprogram, you will be erased from the program, by the program. It’s programmed that way. What do the enforcers really mean by “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..” Perhaps they should finish by saying “Continue to yearn and breath in hopes of freedom while we capitalize on your needs and crushing desire for peace.” So to keep the peace, many keep quiet and shuffle through life in silent desperation: the walking dead.
Ava Duvernay pulled back the covers on the dastardly deeds in her Documentary 13th and the prison industrial complex. The startling revelation is that slavery did not die. It grew stronger and more shrewd and conniving. The same mind that instituted it, evolved it, transformed it into an accepted institution thats still serves the desired end. The art of slave making is social engineering at its best. We are living proof that, as a whole, we are more afraid of freedom that slavery. It’s not just the prisons, it the public at large existing in a state of a perpetual hamster wheel. If we would see with the unclouded eye of true justice, we would realize that what must be done, must be done with a dire sense of urgency.
Notes of A Native Son 
I really appreciate how clearly you writing addresses complex ideas. Slavery has become invisible to many people, and this is what has allowed it to spread like a cancer. America celebrates heroes who ended slavery, yet all the while slavery has become even more intrenched in our country.
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