If you took the time to remove your hood, you might have actually understood. You placed it on my head ostensibly to corral spit projectiles from my mouth. But then three of you held me down and took my life. Some of you laughed as you did the deed. I thought you were crying but those were the almighty’s tears: RAIN.
Removing your hood would reveal that I was no threat at all. As happens sometimes, I was in the middle of a mental health crisis: Schizoid, bipolar or just stressed out by and during the pandemic, my bro called you to help me. Earlier that day he had me hospitalized for a wellness check. Hospital released me within hours. This sort of thing happens when black folk or poor folk go to the hospital. They BE sent home to die from COVID. Yeah, that happens!
Take off your hood and LOOK at my face. Talk to me instead of at my race. You might learn that my skin color is no threat to you. My mind is just not cooperating with what’s real and actual at the moment. I’m seeing monsters and goons abusing me right now saying: You have no right that the white man – or the black man in state action – is bound to respect. It a go Dred Scott out Deh. Omg! Y’all are really monsters and goons at the moment. Defund the police? For damn sure. Right now, in this instance a mental health professional might have saved my black ass. I just needed services and not your lying po-licing.
Take off your hood and engage my humanity. You might learn that I am a brother, a son, a scholar, a clown, a professor, or just some dude out on the town of no particular renown. Take of the hood and see me smile even as I know your abuse is discourtesy, unprofessionalism and disrespect. I only have seconds, minutes, hours, days to live because of your infected with bile.
No Mr. JackASS attorney JAILBARRgeneral, it’s not a newly perceived “phenomenon” that black folk, men in particular, are treated differently in encounters with your officers – offi-cers- OVERSEERS. Small wonder they don’t all have mental breakdowns. But they actually do. Check our collective stress level. It be a clue.
Just take off the hood and look at me. Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award trying to explain it to thee. We tell you in poetry; we tell you in prose. We march. We die. Lord knows we try.
I, Daniel Prude beseech y’all: Just take of the hood and really see me. See that I am no different from you. The blood in my veins is red like yours. I breathe and share the same air to survive. What you say? You blue life, so you different? Ain’t no such thing. Ain’t no Mississippi Goddam blue life. Nina Simone Strange Fruit is still hanging just not from the poplar tree.
Take off the mother-sucker and see me. No, no, no, please no, not the spit hood one you just placed on my head.
The one you are brazenly wearing designed to send me to bed; until the next black body unknowingly traverses your lair; black D-E-S-P-A-I-R
I can breathe. I CAN’T sleep! Don’t think I’ll ever sleep really ever again; not like before.
A Luta Continua
NodM