What Makes You Ashamed Of Being Black?

A mind to kill or be killed.
We struggle with this mentality.
We struggle with it's glaring reality
And we struggle with ways to deal.
Struggle with ways to heal,
And struggle with problems other than that gun
We are normal kids
With problems just like you
We just don't go about them the way you do.
We are hard working teens
We use our heads when we need
But its just so hard to succeed
When this road is paved
The opposite way
When we have no money to pay
For higher education
And we don't have the schools to get a 4.0
When we don't have one book per kid
And our science teacher for the semester is MIA
When people ditch homework to get on Myspace
When I can't stay in a classroom and concentrate
When my notebooks are filled with poetry instead of work
Cause' thats my only ticket out this hood.
I ain't got shit to hold onto but this fucked up ass school
And this skill I was blessed with
And thats what I'm going to make best with
Cause' people will shut that shit up quick
If my degree in linguistics is hanging on my wall when I'm 36
If my degree in psychology is suspended above my desk
Then who's coming out best.
But how do we make it when these fools try and take it
Stomp it out and make me another statistic?
How do we make it when they look down on us like dogs
Sit on us like logs
Put in our heads that we ain't shit
Put us all together and watch us destroy each other.
Put us within a few blocks
Strategically Place a few glocks
And watch the cops pick up the ones that got shot.
Put us in jail
So when we wanna vote
These nigga's take our ballads and throw them away
Into the water that divides our cities by the bay.
When a woman is called a bitch
And if she wanna switch
Then she dykin'
Buttering the other side of the bread
Messin' with that girls head
And tearing her apart
Putting it somewhere in her heart
That she wasn't meant to be.
And its the same with the gay boy
Cause in the locker room people wanna hide themselves away
Thinking their fine enough to draw his stare
And say if a girl ain't got light skin or long hair
What makes you ashamed of being black?
Well I can tell
That they make us ashamed with pictures of milky skin framed
And put on the billboards above out project homes.
And big the woman got it bad,
Cause the only friend she ever had was that sandwich
And don't laugh at that shit cause that makes you that much more ignorant.
These facts are just what goes on
Nothing gets past the people
So just sit tight and hold on
Cause one day
My revolution will start,
And it will blast past all the people that held me back
And we see who has that last laugh Cause' one more person will be free from that Oppressive grasp.
And things will get a little better with every revolutionary act.
And we wont be ashamed of being black.