"Raise The Roof" lyrics - MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO

White supremacy must be in the water
Ingested by police/the prosecutor
And the politicians
Who remain silent while a steady staccato of Black bodies
Fall like leaves/in Ferguson/in Cleveland
It is autumn in America
And the world has lost its fucking mind
White cops caught killing on camera
Forcing us to relive the constant killing of our kin
-a new story cracks our consciousness/every day
Every day we watch/those viral videos
Becoming more and more numb/more struck dumb
By the sheer gall of these cops steady snuffing out
Black lives in their made-in-America home movies
Every day I have to drown my fears
For my child/born Black and girl in a country
In which her safety does not matter
To anyone with any power
I try not to think about
-the catcalls in her future
-the crass comments Black boys make
About Black girl bodies-but this poem is not about that
This poem is about the blatant racism
Embedded in the national justice system
It's about Grand Juries
That consistently refuse to indict murderers
Captured on video/it's about the consensus of white opinions
That overwhelm the evidence
Available to anyone with a fucking cellular phone
I am consuming these murders/on repeat

The helpless bile rising angry in my chest
Public shootings/documented/by onlookers
Images passed around after the event
This phenomenon is Black lynching two point O
Except this time we are spectators of our own genocide
Consuming the flesh of these murdered women and men
Who were never willing martyrs in our movement
Dead children of parents who now mourn them
Without closure/without a day in court
We are moving backward through history
Back to that time when Black mothers
Who lost children to white arrogance had no recourse
That shameful time/that supposedly ended
With Emmett Till
With Herbert Lee
With Medgar Evers
With Harriette Moore
With Malcolm X
-back then/there was no hypocrisy about
The system being stacked against anyone
With a smidgen of melanin staining the history of their skin
Five decades after the Black civil rights movement
And we are still not protected by the law
This is not what we voted for
When we voted our first Black president
This is not what our freedom fighters hoped for
When they marched against segregation in Selma
And Chicago and Birmingham and Montgomery
This is not the dream Dr. Martin Luther King died for
In Memphis, Tennessee
Fifty years later/race relations in America
Is still a fucking cauldron bubbling angry
Under the ugly swirl of Black despair
Held in place by the lack of white accountability
Parading as a penal system/in which
Forty percent of those incarcerated
Come from a group which only consists of 12 percent
Of the entire fucking population
With numbers like that
What good does it do me
To comply with those in uniform?
Body riddled by forty-one bullets
For raising your hands while holding a candy bar
Shot-dead at twelve for holding a toy gun
Strangled by an illegal choke hold/for selling loose cigarettes
Arrested without cause/for walking and talking while Black
All this while we pay taxes
And vote for white presidents
Presiding over these United States
As if Black death did not matter
This country continues to default
On the promise of citizenship for Black people
-a system sworn to protect us
Owes us something when it fails
A system sworn to protect us
Owes us something when it fails
In the roll call for protection
All Black bodies must be accounted for
Straight/queer/transgender
Lesbian/feminist/Muslim/man
Woman/immigrant/dark-skin/
Non-binary/tall/fat/skinny/light-skinned
In the face of any killing
Our sorrow must be one/our rage must one
Though we speak with many voices
We must rise with one sound

We must call out the names of the dead
Trayvon Martin
Tamir Rice
Yvette Smith
Michael Brown
Kiwi Herring
Sean Bell
Tarika Wilson
Sandra Bland could have been any one of us
We have to find the fortitude to keep fighting
For ourselves
For our children
For our children's children
It is time to put our bodies where we say our politics lie
This is not a moment to invoke the sweet by and by
This is a moment for civil fucking disobedience
No matter what you do to our flesh
No matter how long you wage war against our spirit
Our bodies will remain a force of resistance
To the proliferation of White Supremacy
No matter where you came from
No matter how you got here
Inside the brutal walls of these United States of America
White power must always meet fire when it meets with us
If there is any humanity left in you
Get up
Stand up
Sit-in
Join a fucking protest
Pick up a fucking pen
Write
Scream
Wail
March
Pull down a fucking racist flag
Plan
Scheme

Plot a way forward
Fucking strategize
It's time to raise the roof on these motherfuckers
It is time for America to come to terms
With the permanent fact of Black bodies
You have to get used to us white people
Make a decision to do right by us
Do it willingly/or unwillingly
We don't fucking care
As for the progressive white liberals among us
Find the words
To speak to the racist white relatives you keep disowning
All of you have got to get with the fucking program
Because our Black asses are never/ever/ever going away