How can I believe
that your emancipation proclamation
had set the pace for my freedom
with prison bars standing
between my stirring soul and that
of my next-door neighbor?
How can I trust you white America
When you poison my food
When you poison my water
When you poison my community
In your campaign to rule the world?
How can I live in peace
with an offset of political and social equality
that continue to remind me
how white America sees me,
why white America sees me
with as much intellectual caliber
as an untamed baboon with the mind to kill.
How can I pledge my life
to a land that has no respect for me
and feels the need to degrade me
abuse me\confuse me\kill me
in the face of its twisted hegemony?
I am a victim of this axiom.
So how can I white America
Love you when you don't love me?
Trust you when you don't trust me?
How can I white America…………. tell me, how can I?
Written by Olutunde