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by Josef Cadwell
I was born in 1978. This means I was born into a country in a time where Blacks and Women had stronger legal protection of their civil rights than they do today. In 2013, the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating many of the protections Black and Brown people have counted on to help (tenuously) secure their right and ability to vote.
Less than a decade later, the court in an odious decision has taken away women’s constitutional right to the privacy and ownership of their own wombs and vaginas. In effect, abortion has been made illegal. Not only that, but access to affordable contraceptive options, prenatal care, sexual health and reproductive care has been made illegal or impossible for many millions of women.
It is illegal to be Black or Brown in America. Now. In 2022. It is illegal to be a cis or trans woman in America. Now. In 2022.
Remember, first they came for “the Blacks.” Then they came for “the gays.” Then they came for you. We are not safe here. We must find something to unite upon and resist the reincarnation of American fascism, and racial and sexual terrorism. I’m calling for women to lead and show me, show us how to unite Black Lives Matter with the struggle for equality for women and the same for our LGBTQIA sisters and brothers.
If the dismantling of voting rights laws and the reversal of Roe v. Wade is not enough to wake us from the dream of American exceptionalism and equality, what shall it take?
I wish to live in a country where it is legal to live in a Black body.
If the laws that make it illegal to be transgender or have transited a border do not wake us from our fevered dream of American exceptionalism and equality, what shall it take?
The American dream has thus far always been a lie – on our best day perhaps a shaded half-truth. In real time, we are closer to apartheid South Africa, mixed with modern-day Afghanistan under the Taliban, than the nations we traditionally name as allies and peers.
I wish to live in a country where it is legal to live in a Black body, where women own their own wombs and sexuality and sexual identification is a free and legal personal choice. I say this as a believing and practicing Muslim. I say that I do not want to force my ethics and morality (or immorality) onto anyone, or this nation. Freedom is the right to choose how to live without the imposition of another people’s arbitrary moral beliefs and practices.
Any woman has the right to carry her pregnancy to term. Yet this cannot be a decision that is forced upon any woman. We have to protest and flood the streets until women are safe – until it is legal to be a woman in America.
Poem: We are the sons
(A love and praise song for my Mom Kabira, my ex-wife Nicole and my many Mothers before and again).
We are the sons of blood and thunder
Torn from Mother Africa’s bloody womb
Trafficked across the stormy blighted seas of the Middle Passage
We crossed these oceans in prisons with sails
Yes we crossed in chains and shackles
In the filth and stench of American avarice
The screams and low moans of suffering and surviving still echo
Floating beyond death
To another death enshrouded in life
We are the sons of blood and thunder
Torn from our mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s
Mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s bloody womb
Generation after generation of legal rape and legally enforced incest
For the pleasure of the profit and the master
In the dark of stormy nights
In the dark of dusky rooms
We still found ourselves comfort and survival
We brand our cells in memoriam of your brutality
We brand ourselves in memoriam of our Humanity
We are sons of blood and thunder
We are the Black and Brown men
Still toiling, still emerging, still surviving
Across the years, beyond the prison walls
Still marching, still soldiering on,
Still singing praise songs to our Mothers
We are the sons of blood and thunder
And we are still torn from bloody wombs
Still entombed in prisons
By the many millions
With steel bars and doors
Booming and clanging like thunder
In this country of Ours
We built for you brick by brick
Stolen souls in a stolen land
We have manifested freedom
And love
And joy
Despite America’s commitment
To kill the strong bucks and breed the fertile bitches
We are the sons of blood and thunder
Sons of Mothers and Daughters and Sisters and Wives
We sing a praise song of love to them all
The First and The Last
[Joseph, my Sun …
I thought of you as I wrote this poem.
As we say here:
‘I don’t call you Son cuz you mine,
I call you Sun cuz you shine.’
therefore my wish and prayer is this:
Meditate on your Worth and Strength daily, my Son]
Send our brother some love and light: Josef Cadwell, 339620, 9625 Pierce Rd, Freeland, MI 48623.
