400 Years.And.Still

They've been tearing us apart from our men folk since they first brought us here on those slave ships.  We didn't ask to be brought here, as a matter of fact we were kidnapped. Maybe because we don't pick cotton from them anymore, and they can't make us slaves again, they don't need us anymore. Like we don't matter. Yet they've found other ways to enslave us.  Poverty, incarceration, homelessness, subpar or non-existent means to education are some of the ways they tighten the ropes around our necks.

They shoot and kill us like stray dogs, all while denying our Civil Rights. No one understands how the sins of 400 years still haunts the black folks of today. We don't even know why we wake up feeling great despair, anger or just out of place. We don't have a chance at building a family when our men are jailed for 30 or 39 years based on a lie. Or murdered before they become men thus destroying another branch on the ancestral tree. 

Everyone knows if you cut off the branches, the tree won't be protected. Black men are the branches. With them dead or incarcerated, young black women don't know how to be; they lose hope and out of desperation do whatever they need to just to make it another day. Without a nucleus the cell erodes and dies; same goes for the black family. Without black men, the familial unit is incomplete and its offspring are lost. Not knowing how to be, not knowing what a family looks like, those offspring never truly grow to their full potential. The Black family unit is dying and no one seems to know how to save it. Too bad this isn't a fairy tale. Truth really is stranger than fiction.