Who You Callin’ Slave?
Answering to our Ancestors
Saturday, June 15th, 2019, on the horizon of the Strawberry Full Moon, we were standing just off of a trail that runs through the heart of Turtle Creek Park. “Who You Callin Slave?” I recited, louder and louder, as curious and confused Uptown residents glanced and glared our way. Krystal and I laughed and played like four-year-old children that night, in this gentrified part of Dallas, Texas, her behind the camera, advising and directing me around my lines, and me dressed in colonial clothing repeatedly shouting “ENSLAVER” and “FREE” with faces of anger and delight as joggers and cyclists passed by.
Nothing could have made this moment sweeter, except for the fact that this land that we were giddily dancing on is also one of Dallas’ Freedman Towns. I am proud of this land, and the blessing I have to walk the grounds where my ancestors built their independence. Perhaps it was their voices convicting me and jolting enthusiasm through my being as I expressed:
Who you callin slave?
You call yourself talkin to me?
Correct yourself.
I am, have been, and always will be
FREE.
Call yourself enslaver.
Own your shit.
Quit wiping your shit on me.
It’s fine time for you to claim your crimes
Against humanity.
On this moonlit June night, the energy of African people — spiritual, powerful, and righteous free people — came over me. Perhaps our ancestors are among us as most tribal cultures around the world believe. If nothing else, standing atop of the bones of Dallas’ Freedmen, invoking the spirit of Harriet Tubman while performing a verse I wrote in Burkina Faso, West Africa, surely invited them in.
If our ancestors were here, I wonder how they would feel around us, their grandchildren. Would we feel like family for them or are we so disconnected that we’d fell just like the foreigners who kidnapped (enslaved) them?
Who you callin slave?
Our grandparents. Our organizers, warriors, strategists, doctors, lovers, patriots, and revolutionaries. How would they feel about us speaking from their captors’ tongues, calling them slaves instead of who they actually are to us?
This disconnect is by design. After centuries of socialization, we now assume the colonial identifiers and ideologies assigned to us by our captors as our identities. The toxic language and lenses of colonization are so embedded in our psyches that we unconsciously — and regularly — regurgitate racist perspectives about ourselves, our ancestors, and each other.
An example of such an asinine identifier is “slave”, a term that European/Euro-American settler colonialists used to psychologically distance themselves from the brutality they practiced upon the dark-skinned people who they held captive. The term was/is far more an attempt to escape moral accountability for grossly brutal behavior than it is an identity for people held against their will.
“slave” is a term used to assign righteousness to the abusive relationship between terrorists and the people who they terrorized. It is a spell that we cast to normalize the sadism of one people over another, making white violence honorable nationalism, and retaliation by Black people unfounded and ungodly. This magic calls us to uphold colonial miseducation and cultural norms as high truths: if its white, it’s right, and if it’s Black, step back. Each time we use the term slave in reference to our ancestors, we sacrifice our souls in agreement to our make-believe station as subhumans.
Humans, in the settler-colonialist lens, are European American saviors who have divine rights to control the world and defend themselves, their land, and their loves. Subhumans, on the other hand, are dark-skinned indigenous people worldwide who — as savages with no souls — have no rights at all. Subhumans feel no pain; thus, have no reactions to abuse. Subhumans have no brains; thus have no rationale for self-defense. Subsequently, we normalize visuals of Black non-defense in face of consistent brutality to perpetuate the myth of Black-skinned people as not human. And in the instances when some of us courageously own our humanity and decide our lives are worth defending, the rest of us criticize them as crazy, displacing the psychosis of the unprompted violence from enslavers/fraternal orders of police/terrorists, onto the healthy responses from those radical enough to care to survive. Is it possible that our internalized oppression is so deep that we are afraid of even witnessing our freedom? Have we become so blindly invested in protecting the “master’s” American dream that we’ll forever endure the live nightmare of our genocide? Does this slave spell that we speak lead us to scold our children for resisting psychological warfare in schools and to silence free-thinkers for wanting more than incremental progress and systems tinkering?
Let us remember, our ancestors were declared “slaves” by people suffering psychological trauma/psychosis after generations of patriarchal abuse, slavery, and classism in their European homelands. These mentally-unstable settler-colonialists held Indigenous Americans and Africans hostage, and performed multiple forms of physical brutality, psycho-spiritual abuse, and genocide against them for 500 years, to present, while stealing land, labor, and legacy. Sadistic settler-colonialists such as these have no right to define any people, not even themselves. They need healing and so do we.
We must reclaim “free” as an inherent part of our identities instead of an ideal we hope to someday achieve.
Who you callin slave?
Our ancestors are free beings whose resilient love and rational defense of their homelands, families, and new “negro” communities was swept under the rug of racism. It is time to correct mass memory. Their power and brilliance propel and sustain us as the dominant cultural force of the world. Their DNA and genetic memory run through our blood, bones and brains. If we call them slaves, isn’t that the same as calling our cells, and in essence ourselves, the same?
Who you callin slave?
You call yourself talkin to me?
Correct yourself.
I am, have been, and always will be
FREE.
Call yourself enslaver.
Own your shit.
Quit wiping your shit on me.
It’s fine time for you to claim your crimes
Against humanity.
Who you callin poor?
I know you ain’t talkin to me.
Correct yourself.
I am, have been, and always will be
WEALTHY.
How the hell you callin me poor
And you stealin from me?
You take my land and the fruit of my labor
Then say I’m in poverty?
Who you callin Third World?
You can’t be talkin to me.
Correct yourself.
I am, have been, and always will be
PRIMARY.
Miss me with your First World shit.
When you suckin your riches from my titty.
You takin my gold, diamonds, and minerals…
Sounds like you’re “Third World” to me.
