The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. The Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians.
And so the people of no skin
let the people of dark skin go free,
the war ended, a time to rebuild,
to make right: and the leaders
crossed out the lines
three-fifths men and made them
five-fifths human like all mankind.
Laws were passed and ideas spread,
but there was no God to split the Red Sea,
no laws to stop the cowards in white hoods,
no Messiah to preach against evil.
And so it went. Freed from slavery,
no place to go, caught in webs of distrust,
glued to statutes creating slavery anew.
No one thought to halt the palaces of inferiority,
to cut Jim Crow off before he ran with agility,
to stop segregation before it became a rule of life.
The sharecropper, the man harassed
because of a difference in skin, inmates of racism,
prisoners of colorism—the new slaves.
And so the former slave never received assistance,
his children and children’s children received no help—
year after year nothing changed, but the Bible
speaks of reparations. Go home. Take out your Bible.
Read Exodus, Chapters 11 to 15.
Think about what you read. It is up to us
to make the change, to offer the step up,
to do what God asked when a people are freed,
when a people are given hope for a better way,
a life with dignity, the chance to see the possibilities.
Let us be the agitators, advocates, the agents for change.
| Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
Interesting phase, “people of no skin,” as though white people only came to be referred to that way when the “people of dark skin” became important enough to discuss racially in relation to other races. Assuming, of course, there’s such a thing as human races.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Michael, to end off Black History Month!
And thank you for your excellent insights!
ReplyDelete