Check out: Triple Minority – courtesy of @dnicholadams
Dear America,
Let me start off by saying I thank you for your interest in my civil liberties.
I mean, for hundreds of years you have done your part to ensure that by mere accident of birth I am always just a little further behind the curve of being able to freely exercise my “certain unalienable rights.”
Thanks to you my skin color once dictated whether I would live a life swarmed with the luxury of then-modern amenities such as free labor, “borrowed” culture, and all the wealth that I could manage to pile upon the backs of a group of people who only sought to survive in a land that they never chose to be introduced to in the first place .
Or whether I would struggle for the rest of my life to out live a stereotype that my brain is inferior, that my values are under appreciated, and that my children’s children children will still be shackled by the invisible chains of blatantly subjacent access to life’s necessities of equal education and a balanced and fair justice system.
Let’s be honest, just because the whips and chains are not tangible does not mean that they do not exist.
So Dear America, I thank you.
I thank you for the 89 years of state and local laws which helped to ensure that my grandfather and his grandfather and his grandfather were “separate but equal” from your grandfather and his grandfather and his grandfather.
I thank you for every time my ascendents had to look their small children in the eye and explain to them why they could not take a sip of water out of that fountain, or why they could not take advantage of that amusement park, or why they could not attend that school.
I show you gratitude for every wrinkle of worry placed on the countenance of my great grandmother each and every time one of her sons ran a little late for dinner that night.
Tears of worry welling in the corners of eyes aged beyond their years from witnessing the sight of a tree garnished with suspended flesh burdened with generations of fear.
Dear America, I thank you.
I appreciate the way in which you allowed my gender to be held at bay by the weight of raising children that we taught to salute to a flag only to have to whisper to them that “for liberty and justice for all” only applied to those with a penis.
I applaud you for your ability to make no excuses for the casual way that you waited 144 years to allow us to participate in a democracy that we helped build and then attempt to act surprised when 90 years later we are still expected to be “seen and not heard.”
I laud the way you so inconspicuously ignore your role in aiding and abetting the misogynistic dispositions when you were responsible for placing the notion of unequal dexterity into the minds of patriarchs past.
Dear America, I thank you.
It is because of your hard work that I am not seen as an individual who loves an individual; but a phase, a victim of abuse over-compensating for the gender of my abuser, a thing that can be corrected if only I had the right dick.
I am obliged for your sheer tenacity in protection of an Act that states it is in the Defense of Marriage but will not let my love be demonstrated through the practice of it.
I am enamored by the way you stand firm on your principles of separation of church and state yet allow states to church their way into denying me the right to call a woman my wife.
But most of all, my Dear America, I thank you for the callous way that you ignore the basis of your foundation whenever it is convenient for you.
For the way that you apply your texts, your documents, your symbols only to those of your choosing and bid the rest of us good luck as we navigate the tumultuous waters of inequality.
Dear America, I thank you.
Because of you I now know that the quote mounted inside your Statute of Liberty calling for your “tired, your poor, your huddled masses longing to be free” does not apply to a triple minority.
I like this…