Me'Shell Ndegeocello - Raise the Roof Lyrics

It must be in the f*cking water
Being force-fed to the police, the prosecutor
And the politicians who care nothing for Black bodies
Falling like leaves in late August
In Ferguson, in Cleveland, in Staten Island
Only minutes away from where my own child sits
Watching The Muppets take over Manhattan
I am aching complicit, indulgently nursing an October heartbreak
While the world crumbles insensible, inexplicable in November
It is now December and the world has lost its f*cking mind
Christmas trees being erected like dicks
Amidst the groundswell of Bil Cosby accusers
Coming out of the closet of secrecy
Synchronizing with stories about frat boys growing up rapists
All this as the national justice system wraps up cases
In pretty colored presentations to grand juries
Who collectively refuse to indict murderers captured on video
Freed by unpopular opinions that trump the overwhelming evidence
Available to anyone with a cellular phone
I am holding my own sorrow back from my own child
Born Black in a country in which her brown body does not matter
To anyone with any power
I am watching these videos over and over again
The helpless bile rising angry in my chest
I am not feeling forgiving
It is time for these oppressors to turn their f*cking cheek
To the public victims
All these accounts of these killings reek of racism
These events mount a war against the poor
This is not a f*cking video game
These men who are killed are not dominoes
These dead boys belonged to people who now mourn them
Without closure, without a day in court
We are moving backward through history
Foolish as it might've been, we the people
Had swallowed the fallacy that trumpeted the end of a time
When Black mothers who lost children to white arrogance had no recourse
That shameful time, that supposedly ended
When Emmett Till, when Herbert Lee, when Medgar Evers
When Harriette Moore, when Malcolm X
Back then, there was no hypocrisy about the system being stacked against anyone
With a smidgen of melanin staining the history of their skin
Fifty years later we must continue to raise our resources
To protest the blatant lies littering Black people's experiences with the law
We are not protected by it
This is not what we voted for when we voted for our first Black president
This is not what freedom fighters hoped for
When they marched against segregation in Selma, in Chicago
This is not the dream Dr. Martin Luther King spoke about in Washington, D.C.
Almost a decade and a half into the 21st century
Race relations in America is still a f*cking cauldron bubbling angry
Under the ugly swirl of Black despair and a lack of white accountability
Parading as a penal system, in which forty percent of those incarcerated
Come from a group which only consists of twelve percent of the entire f*cking population
With numbers like that, what good does it do me to comply with those in uniform?
I am shot at twelve years old for waving a toy gun you sell to me every Christmas
Wrestled to the ground for breaking up a fight because
You suspect me of selling loose cigarettes
Put in an illegal chokehold because I dare to ask why
The whole incident filmed for my family to watch my death played out
On primetime TV, the public angle assuaged by the assumption
That justice has to eventually come
My death must mean something more than a footnote in media frenzy of our time
I am owed something for having been violated by a system sworn to protct me
My name is Trayvon Martin, my name is Tamir Rice
My daughter is Michael Brown, your mother is Sean Bell
Your father Yvette Smith
Eleanor Bumpus could have been any one of us
I am Amadou Diallo and Eric Garner is all of us
This phenomenon is an invisible epidemic where
The victims are forever silenced by state-sanctioned executions
We have to find the courage to speak for them
We must find the voice of resistance for ourselves
For our children, for our children's children
It is time to raise more than our eyebrows in protest
It is time to put our bodies where our hopes lie
This is not a moment to invoke the sweet by and by
Now is a moment for action
If there's any humanity left in you get up, stand up
Join a f*cking protest, pick up a f*cking pen
Write, scream, wail, march, meet, gather
Plan, strategize, it is time to find a way to make them listen
It is time to make the powers that be hear
They need to see we are no longer complicit
It's time to raise the roof on these motherf*ckers
It is time, it is time we raise the roof on these motherf*ckers
So they know we are never, ever going away