Reparations Are To Silence

A restoration of what paper tried to erase, and what blood never forgot:

We see today what we’ve seen before in Indigenous America. When asking Americans if the land was stolen, the common response is “didn’t we pay them back?” Attempting to put a price tag on the sufferings of our ancestors, & the unimaginable suffering of having to know what could have been, the freedom lost.

Slavery as we know it today, was rival tribes, capturing and selling rival tribes instead of taking their lives & in that light, freeing. The ancestors of the enslaved today, of Which I have some in my ancestry, are just as likely to be descended from Chiefs, Kings, Queens, & Leaders of their tribes and ancestral areas, much like how its common today for Europeans to find the same in their ancestry. What’s rare isn’t the blood, though the proof, & with this clarity, we find that one of the horrors of slavery goes unspoken today: Delegitimization. Identity theft.

The horror’s we often forget today, how Indigenous culture, lineage, & legitimacy was something forced assimilation itself tried to ensure we forget, by force of law, is happening under the radar this very moment to African descendants throughout the world. They can refuse our equal legitimacy on paper, but not in blood & spirit.

Knowing our lineage gives us freedom from others trying to impose their legitimacy and authority upon us. I’ve witnessed this firsthand with law enforcement multiple times. The moment you say something like “The Legend in American Government & the Patron Saint of America: St. Tammany is my ancestor,” Instead of hearing, “I’m the other half of this country’s peaceful foundation,” they follow up with the same script: “How many quarters are in a dollar. What day is it today?” Standard protocol in the face of unshakable spiritual sovereignty, though there are a rare few that are gracefully mutually respectful that remind me of my faith in humanity. I don’t say these things to get an upper hand. I say them so I don’t have to submit outside of equality ever.

Now I’m revealing you this same gift, as it’s statistically more likely than not, that you also have Chiefs, Kings, Queens, Spirituals, etc. in your bloodline. It’s their personal legitimacy aka authority they try to place upon you by suggesting you to assume the position of a descendant of the enslaved, the same way jealous authoritarians tried to delegitimize my Mom, in hopes I’d assume the position of a descendant of the Devil herself. Demean to lead is the name of the game for those that feel they can lead no other way. That their legitimacy itself depends on the illegitimacy of others. They tried to erase our legitimacy in fear of our equality. The only way to nourish one branch, is to nourish the whole tree. Equality is the only path, though we grow first through the ground to reach the sky.

We see the same pattern happening in the workplace, where society lets itself practice inequality openly and somehow acceptedly. They wish to choose the way we look and even the way we speak and sound, taking away our sovereignty around every corner, justified by payment itself… It’s this same way they wish you to accept payment for something no dollar can repair. Trying to put a price tag on it is the same oddity The Indigenous face, as owning land is as odd as owning the sea or the air.

With medical advancements, I predict a day where blood itself can make up for what was lost on paper. Spiritually we can heal knowing our enslaved ancestors were only a fraction of the generations before them. That slavery is only a ring in the trunk of the tree of Africa.