A POEM BY BOBBY BURNS
“History is not hatred” Malcolm X
America has been a roaring train on a track of absurdity,
picking up steam
all the time, on and on and on…
Take the A B C D E Examination:
A.
How/ How/ How
The Indian Land Grab
The Headrights: The Greatest Land Giveaway to whites
The Jefferson’s Curse: Primogeniture and Entail
Slavery: The most Profitable Business of All Time
The Sugar to Cotton to Oil; whites Got to Have it
The Jim Crow Laws: Mo Money
The New Slavery: Sharecropping, Predatory Lending & Debt Slavery
The Religious Racism: The “Curse of Ham”
B.
When/ What/ Why
The Labor Unions: Racial Cleansing of American Labor
White Domestic Terrorism
The Great Compromise of 1877
The Dawes Act 1887- Indian Holocaust
The Asian Exclusion Act
Don’t forget the Citizenship and Immigration- For Whites only
Plessy vs. Ferguson: Separate But (Not equal)
C.
What/ What/What
Good ol’ Woodrow Wilson and White Supremacy in the White House
Public Education: The 4th R- Racism
The Student debt: Slavery for Black People, Wealth for Wall Street and Government
The Stock Market- Race Roulette
The Sub-Prime Mortgages: Whites ‘Massive 3-Card Monte
The Sundown Towns
The Homestead Act: This Land is Our Land!
Public Housing: “The Projects”
The Black tax
U.S Housing Act (Urban Renewal)
D.
How/ How / How
The Black Consumer Slaves
The Prison Industry
The War on Black Drug Users
The Hollywood and Racial Propaganda
Patents: The Black-Ingenuity Snatchers
The Federal Reserve Cookery
Health Care- “Sick Care” Industry
E.
When, What and Why
Brother, can you spare $300 Billion? Charitable Giving
Good ol’ Boy Network
Police Power: Keeping Blacks in “Their Place”
Affirmative Action
The G.I Bill- White Veteran Programs
The Veterans Administration (VA) Mortgages and Economic Dependency
This is a funky dark bag of history, the evidence of time, the light of memory
and order of events. And now the death of George Floyd and the brothers and sisters before him.
Black Lives Matter, let us breathe America and stop the madness.
Bobby Burns is the author of Shelter- One man’s journey from homelessness to hope and former editor of the Sojourner Newsletter for the Tucson NAACP Tucson Branch