Dear History of Oppression:
Fuck you!
You have ruled generations of my ancestors with your hate, your weapons, your lies, your propaganda, your half truths, your fragile supremacy. I refuse to be ruled by you.
Every day that I exist in a gender norm that feels normal to me, embracing a sexuality that’s my definition of sexy, choosing to stare down your definition of patriarchy that makes paternal instincts a degenerate notion and manhood a mockery defined by machismo and rape culture and the exertion of one’s own beliefs onto another by force.
I will not be lectured by a Father that you claim is ‘our’ father when I’d just as soon have spit at my own father for trying to exert his will against my own. I know I am strong. I am fierce. I am untamable. Because in my veins runs the blood of a thousand slaves, witches, medicine men and women, the silenced homosexual all those you tried to oppress who fought out loud or to the silent beating in their chest who refused to be erased by your self righteous appropriation.
Who are you to say what is and is not appropriate? Your perfect system has birthed creatures too fragile to sit in the face of a “no” a “not today” an “it’s not your turn”, and instead choose to riot, shoot, blow up, and burn. A system so accustomed to coverups that your children get slaps on the wrists and rehab while ours get criminalized simply because we don’t know the right doors to knock on.
The words “one day it will be your turn” still ring in ears like background noise that has lost it’s meaning. But still we know determination, organizing, collective action, and connectivity can birth change step by step, inch by inch, mile by mile until the ropes that were once used to hang bodies from trees are instead used to elevate those who are still on a level below; to lift others up to stand beside us as we march into a future that is made by us, all of us, not just some of us or them — the white men who only held selective truths to be self evident while denying too many equal rights that were promised.
Equality is not a limited resource and those oppressed are not enemies.
We are strong. All the fires you set, all the chains you forged, all the children taken and discarded, all the bullets that sailed through all the many skies on all the many lands that were battle grounds could not extinguish us.
We.
Are.
Still.
Here.
In the children and their children are our ancestors. Their spirit guides us. It’s the ache in our chest when we gaze upon oppression. It’s the mistrust of a status quo and a demand not to question. It’s the knowing that those who are meant to protect us do not always protect us and many times do more harm than good because they themselves hold onto many scars of many harms done onto them.
We.
All.
Bleed.
Red.
So when I gaze into your eyes of hate, when I hear the words that should silence me: “You should not be here”, “you don’t belong here”, “go back to where you came from” I know that here is where I belong. Standing on the other side of you. Your fire fueled by hate, mine fueled by the many labors of love that brought me into my self love and knowing that I should be here. I belong just where I am. I have nowhere else I need to be but right here.
As I gaze upon your colonizer’s will to own me, mold me, fix me, make me, break me. The one thing I have to say is: fuck you.
Caia Rose 