Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Can We Have A Talk With You?
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
17 Feb 2016
🖨️ Print Article

by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

Prescient, pertinent and pointed questions to each other, and to our alleged betters about what we have, what we are, what we deserve, and what we settle for, posed by BAR's poet in residence.

Can We Have A Talk With You?

by BAr poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

Can little you phone in plays for a big pro sport?
Can bought politicians run without your support?
Can they take over the schools and school board?
Can they make your children pray to their lord?

Can they wash millions of brains in a large box?
Can the get their Goebbels-walk on...on FOX?
Can they keep the masses asleep and uncritical?
Can they make a people, a-historical, apolitical?
Can they keep scaring you shitless in September?
Can they, then—presto—change after November?

Can they pay all Blacks less than whites?
Can they say that voting exercises rights?
Can fools unlearn voting is democracy?
Can cold figures not lie about plutocracy?

Can big money make pols into yes-men?
Can they then move about like chessmen?
Can they also lie like printing machines?
Can they even play Capone with marines?
Can they lie almost every time they speak?
Can they produce nearly a war each week?

Can they, uh,—oops—overtax you in error?
Can they use it fighting their ‘war on terror?’
Can they make trillions, uh, just, disappear?
Can they make killings on their wars and fear?

Can they give you more hope and change?
Can it come straight from the rifle range?
Can they shoot some blacks and belt beers?
Can they do it over again every four years?

Can they deliver change you can believe in?
Can you use more black clothes to grieve in?
Can they lace your rivers and aquifers with lead?
Can they just put six slugs in your child’s head?

Can they keep increasing peoples’ debt exposure?
Can they cause workers even more foreclosure?
Can they poison peoples’ drinking water in Flint?
Can they double— and even quadruple your rent?
Can they coolly ethnic cleanse your neighborhood?
Can they claim your home for the corporate good?

Can they send billions to the apartheid settler state?
Can they tell Motown that it will just have to wait?
Can they keep killing socialized medicine?
Can they keep conning—like Con Edison?
Can they forevermore lie about socialism?
Can the ‘white’ ‘race’ card stay the schism?

Can ‘white’ knaves know wealth Trumps all?
Can the black ones get over the Hil in free-fall?
Can some old fools, dupes, dopes even learn—
Hope and change is back and Feelin’ the Bern?

Raymond Nat Turner © 2016 All Rights Reserved

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • Paul Robeson’s American Ballad
    Gregory N. Heires
    Paul Robeson’s American Ballad
    28 Oct 2020
    Brilliant and amazingly multitalented, Robeson was once among the most popular men in the U.S;, but became a non-person under relentless red-baiting. 
  • Free Ruchell “Cinque” Magee!
    Kameron Hurt
    Free Ruchell “Cinque” Magee!
    28 Oct 2020
    Ruchell Magee is the longest-held political prisoner in the United States and the world.
  • Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty
    Liza Featherstone 
    Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty
    28 Oct 2020
    Even as many more people around the world have access to education, schooling everywhere remains intertwined with systems of oppression, including racism and capitalism.
  • Haiti and a Long History of Assault
    Lautaro Rivara
    Haiti and a Long History of Assault
    28 Oct 2020
    For fifteen years Latin American nations collaborated in the military occupation of Haiti, but have yet to apologize for their crimes.
  • Twitter Surveillance Startup Targets Communities of Color for Cops
    Sam Biddle
    Twitter Surveillance Startup Targets Communities of Color for Cops
    28 Oct 2020
    Insiders say Dataminr’s “algorithmic” Twitter search involves human staffers perpetuating confirmation biases, searching specific neighborhoods, streets, and even housing complexes for crime.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us