We are love, something that we learned by helping each other when we were low. When it felt like the world was against us and we had nothing. We are strength, something we all have to help us move forward to protect and rebuild the cultures that they try to destroy time after time. We are proud, never letting them silence everything we have made and want to be, trying so hard to crush us but failing every time they do it.
We were the kids who got into fights over things that old white people say “doesn’t matter anymore” or “it’s in the past”. I remember being on that bus that time that kid called me less human and called me things like monkey or alien, the ones that ripped the notebook from my hands and took a lighter to it. They never understood what I was like from them, and they just couldn’t accept it. We were the kids that got jumped, bullied, or overall just made fun of because of our cultures or stuff they didn’t understand. I remember getting beaten outside the baseball field for trying to join their team or for trying to be their friend. I asked, “Why,” but was only met with a punch in return. We were the kids who got into large fights over race and trying to fit in a system that hated us before they even knew our names. I remember when there were about 30 of us who got into a fight over who was better: white or black. Knuckles were covered in colors of red and purple rather than white or brown. We were the ones who got so used to the line “hands in the air now and don’t move” to the point where we started singing it like it was the latest song. We were the kids they would call “gang members” just for being near each other in a big group where most of us weren’t even the same race.
We were the ones that they threw tear gas at and called us criminals for wanting to live and be ourselves in a world that wants anything but that. I can remember the day when I couldn’t breathe as my lungs were being filled with tear gas. We were the ones who kept writing again and again and again to make sure our stories were never kept in the dark to bring them to light. They said, “You’re telling me you’re going to this program to just write about your people’s stories; that’s lame and a waste of time; it’s in the past to get over it”. We are the ones who were killed by the same people who are there to protect us. It took them over seventeen bullets to realize that he was dead. Just to say shots fired as if we don’t know.
They call me scary; they call me a problem; they call me a threat at the same time they point guns at me. Or when they kill us like we were sheep.
We are more than this
We
Are
Human