What gives these people the right to discount us?

 

to not count us in their equations or in their plans for what they envision the world to be like

 

Are we not human beings, do we not breath, do we not bleed, do we not think, feel and believe?

 

What is the part of being a human being that matters?

 

How is it that any part of you or me can be disqualified and put on the chopping block to be sacrificed and slaughtered to the gods of economic gain?

 

Why is it that our pain is not something that matters?

 

Real talk, they say don’t steal, it’s wrong, it is something that will get you put into prison, if not dead in the streets by police who are there to protect you

 

protect and serve. serve and learn. rehabilitation. recidivism. three strikes you’re out. no college. do not pass go, go directly to jail…

 

I digress.

 

Stealing is wrong.

 

Did I miss something, whose land is this fool on while making the claim that stealing is wrong?

 

Oh, I get it. It is only wrong if the people are taking back what is rightfully ours.

 

Discounted.

 

Are the hopes and dreams, aspirations and needs of the young children and the elderly

 

Discounted

 

Is the intergenerational trauma that we suffer while attempting to succeed, like it is our fault for being red lined and denied jobs, kicked out of school and warehoused in prisons, like its our fault firing squads of law enforcement officers unleash volleys of bullets into innocent victims, while the Bundy’s take over land or other white “assailants” like the culprit in the Charleston 9, gets walked out alive and gets bought a burger on his way to jail because the cops were concerned for his welfare

 

Obviously, his life was not discounted

 

When the department of planning and development grants the permit of some developer to build an over-priced, over-sized condominium hoping to fill it with the influx of Microsoft and Amazon workers without making a plan for how to assist people who are of low-income status who also tend to be Black, women, and with children more often are discounted, marginalized, and pushed to the fringe as if their lives did not matter

 

When decisions are made purely on the basis of economic considerations and yet have very real social impacts, those decisions are wrong, if the decision makers do not take into account the harms that will result from those decisions and act so as to mitigate them.

 

The truth is that we are not being discounted, but rather, that we are being counted by different standards, as I said before, these decision makers value us based on the sweat our labor displaces, hence the warehousing of Black people in the Prison Industrial Complex, 13^th Amendment “crime clause” slave labor

 

Shattering the social connections in our neighborhoods through gentrification and displacement breaks the defending units against the vultures preying on our children in their public schools trying to erase the history of enslavement

 

That’s right, our ancestors, our brothers and sisters were not born into slavery as if it was a precondition of the color of their skin, but rather, someone imposed the status of the cast system upon them

 

Not discounted, but counted differently, 3/5 of a human being means not granted the full citizenship of other human beings

 

It is long past due, that we starting counting correctly

 

Reparations Now