Days after the shocking win of Donald Trump, Vic Mensa has penned an open letter addressing racism head on and encouraging us all that the fight is not over.
“I was kind of woozy when I first found out. Just to see such a symbol of hatred and opposition to equality be put in our nation’s highest office.
I was in Atlanta working with The-Dream on some things. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t my election to win or lose. Then, when I woke up in the morning, I realized that this had to happen because we’ve been pacified by having Barack [Obama] in office. That pacification would have only continued by having Hillary elected.
My fight doesn’t end here no matter the outcome. I could have felt a bit more comfortable but a felt sense of security had Hillary won, because the things that I’ve been talking about this year and going hard on are the same. Those things have not changed. They’ve just manifested themselves in slavery, Jim Crow Laws, segregation and mass incarceration. Even the conversations people have about mass incarceration don’t get to the issue. They always talk about nonviolent crimes. They don’t even get the issue and how different this nation treats its prison system. It’s not just nonviolent offenders that need to be re-evaluated. It’s the entire mother—-ing system.
To people who have been led to believe you are white, race is the child of racism; racism is not the child of race. Race is a fairly new idea that’s been used to divide and conquer. If you look at a lot of historical texts, when you’re describing Italian war generals, it wasn’t described as black. Might have been North African. People had real backgrounds. We have Irish people, English people, Polish people, Russians, and Chinese people, and Indians from India, Native Americans. All of this brown, black and white has stolen the true identity of humanity and been used to categorize people so they can focus on their differences more than their similarities.”
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