By Phoenix Calida
If you talk to me about “you can’t be going down to ferguson, you have kids you need to raise”
I Will Cuss Out So Bad you will cry.
Who the fuck you think I’m going down there for?
How you expect me to teach my children how to become responsible courageous adults if I’m too scared to speak on brothers and sisters being murdered in cold blood?
How the fuck am I gonna teach my children about solidarity when I show none for our own folks?
How will my children learn what it means to stand for the right thing if I sit this one out?
How will my children learn what dignity is if I don’t defend the right of our people to have it?
Our children learn by watching. If they don’t see us standing tall, being brave, defending their right to dignity, pushing for their right to live, who will teach them? What lesson will they learn if we don’t reconstruct the narrative?
I am teaching my children how to become informed adults with a clear conscience. I’m NOT raising them to walk around being scared to live or scared to look oppressors in the face.
My bloodline has been through centuries of genocide, slavery, and dehumanization. I need to teach my children to be humans who view themselves as equals.
I’m not raising another generation of slaves.
The ancestors went through too much to trying to stand up, I’m not going to disgrace their memory or ruin my own offspring by to teaching my babies to lay down in the face of injustice.
So keep my name and my children’s name out your mouth and tell me what you taught *your* children today.
Did you teach them to fight for our community or did you teach them some things are more important than our right to live?