White America, you deliberately forget how whiteness caused black suffering. And it shows in the strangest ways. You forget how you kept black folk poor as sharecroppers. You forget how you kept us out of your classrooms and in subpar schools. You forget how you denied us jobs, and when we got them, how you denied us promotions. You forget how you kept us out of the suburbs, and now that you’re gentrifying our inner city neighborhoods, you’re pushing us to the suburbs. You forget that you kept us from voting, and then blamed us for being lackadaisical at the polls.
