I cannot begin to express how much I would love to merely be a student. That the only things I was concerned about were my grades.  For a recovered alcoholic/addict, person who went from being in a gang to living on the street via a stretch in the juvenile prison system, for whom attending the UW was nearly statistically impossible, trust me when I say, I wish I could merely be a student focused on my classes and grades.

But when our people are being slain and executed in the streets on a nearly daily basis nation wide. And my own friends are being profiled, targeted, assaulted, and battered by the UW police, it makes it nearly impossible for me to only be a student focused on my grades. I went from being the valedictorian of one school with an almost 4.0 status to failing classes. Not because I do not know the material and that I do not stay up all hours of the night to make sure I do, but because my assignments when I find the time to work on them in between all the challenges to this white supremacist and racist super structure we call The STATE, they are either late or never get turned in. “If not us, who? If not now, when?” It’s like they want us to continue in the impoverished state of learned helplessness and just accept the way that our people are being treated and devalued. Institutions like the UW are like yes we love and welcome Black people, but check your culture at the door because you are entering into a white space and you might scare the other students. But “to be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.” Then they have the audacity to tell us that we are being “uncivilized,” when that is the same rhetoric that justified the extermination of the Indigenous peoples of this land. Ain’t shit changed in the ideologies. They also tell us to wait for a more opportune time but when they say wait it is as if they are saying “never.” Like don’t worry about us abducting your cousin or your mother, raping your sister, pillaging your village, outsourcing your jobs, gentrifying your neighboorhoods, providing mandatory deplorable education then blaming us for not being more intelligent; we will get our shit straight in time. No! This shit has to end now. They keep trying to suppress the problems like that will make them go away. But we all know that is not the case. The police target and kill and go unpunished. The state enslaves our bretheren and profits. The U.S. who promoted the United Nations will still not fully ratify the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights! How can they when it would undermine everything that holds the United States up as a super power of oppression and exploitation, carnage and termoil, of blatant terrorism?

I would love to merely be a student focused on my classes and my grades, but each time I try to do that, the evil hydra that is Amerikka rears one of its ugly heads and strikes out at our people. I just cannot in good conscience shut out the reality of our world the way they want us to.