Shackles OFF Aisha Truss-Miller

Shackles OFF

Aisha Truss-Miller

The shackles have not COME OFF! They are in courtrooms and on vans or buses headed to county jails from popo stations, and to prisons from jails, from youth detention centers to destinations leading our children to nowhere that they deserve to be.

The shackles have not COME OFF! They are twist-ties, billy clubs, and officers giving youth busted lips and black-eyes at BLM demonstrations, officers in our schools, and guns in our streets or in the hands of police trained to gun us down while we stand with toys and phones in hand.... or, Or in our sleep. Rest in heaven Breonna Taylor, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and many more.

The shackles have not COME OFF! They are knees in necks, words of disrespect, actions of violence and hate, embedded in and upheld by every institution- which all reiterate daily symbols and text that celebrate actors of genocide, as long as they fly an American flag, as long as they generate profits for this country. The clanking of shackles inspire policymakers and investorswho ought to be properly titled as enslavers; who ought to be imprisoned themselves, I call on spirits of my descendents and ancestors To haunt their peace until we get justice and reparations.

The shackles have not COME OFF! They connected lines of gangs of Black men before bangin’ becomes

survival- Men imprisoned for being Black, imprisoned for not being hired by white men, imprisoned for being unwilling to be slave laborers bound to oppressors, Black men collected for chain gangs- and who sang, “I’ve been working on the railroad- all the lil’ long day” [in chains].

The shackles have not come off, they look like sharecroppers able to tend to lands they won’t inherit or if granted- they must fight tooth and nail, dolla for dolla to stop a system always actively working to take everything away from us (and others) and claim it as theirs.

The shackles have not come off, they look like bombs and burnings, no-knock raids, Terrorizing black communities, enterprises, and churches- any space about our production. Black bodies of women, of children, men, human beings, being raped and discarded. The violence against Black people on this land, it spans for centuries- without an ending in sight. And still we fight to remove our chains.

The shackles have not come off!- they are replaced with divested from Black schools grooming prisoners to fill cages to employ those with superiority complexes. Pipelines proven to be toxic, proven to increase white families pockets in every little town where all the Black people are numbers and have no names.

The shackles have not come off! They are misdiagnosis of my wombs and my sisters’ wombs, removing our parts with misinformation to boost profits off our body through hospitalizations, forced abortions, no access to abortion and healthy contraception and meds for transgender women, no quality childcare, and throughout history the sterilization and experiments- with no consent- on incarcerated Black & Brown women, poor women, and queer women; it’s being forced in jail, the military, school and life to identify as a woman, even when you don’t.

The shackles have not come off! They are the lack of access to all the things to live and to thrive. The shackles have not come off if massive student debt and the military are our youth’s top success options- Chicago has the largest military public school system in our nation, not by coincidence.

The shackles are greenbacks, they are alarm clocks, They are the blocks in the road to self love and community healing, Yet, we fight for, find, and create moments to be free. For me, I married the love of my life, innocent and fighting for his life, While he stood in a county jumpsuit shackled before me. Radical Black Love is revolutionary, a force they shackles can’t bind!

The shackles have not COME OFF! They are around our necks, ankles, and wrists, bound to our hips, minds and hearts, Blood drenched, heavily carried by generations. They’ve ignited freedom dreams and also choked life from our dreams of freedom, We find freedom in the fight for it- , In Breaking the Silence, In Love, in hope, in taking action, in calling out inaction as violence, So we keep fighting for freedom in shackles because we have nothing to lose but our chains