Vic Mensa continues to be a fighter for freedom, and Trump’s win as president-elect is only giving him more fuel — a fuel to fight injustice — and it has never been more important than right now. Today he penned a guest essay for Billboard, which ran today. You can read his full piece here, but first check out a few excerpts below.
I was kind of woozy when I first found out. Just to see such a symbol of hatred and opposition to equality be put in our nation’s highest office.
I was in Atlanta working with The-Dream on some things. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t my election to win or lose. Then, when I woke up in the morning, I realized that this had to happen because we’ve been pacified by having Barack [Obama] in office. That pacification would have only continued by having Hillary elected.
My fight doesn’t end here no matter the outcome. I could have felt a bit more comfortable but a felt sense of security had Hillary won, because the things that I’ve been talking about this year and going hard on are the same. Those things have not changed. They’ve just manifested themselves in slavery, Jim Crow Laws, segregation and mass incarceration. Even the conversations people have about mass incarceration don’t get to the issue. They always talk about nonviolent crimes. They don’t even get the issue and how different this nation treats its prison system. It’s not just nonviolent offenders that need to be re-evaluated. It’s the entire mother—-ing system.
To people who have been led to believe you are white, race is the child of racism; racism is not the child of race. Race is a fairly new idea that’s been used to divide and conquer. If you look at a lot of historical texts, when you’re describing Italian war generals, it wasn’t described as black. Might have been North African. People had real backgrounds. We have Irish people, English people, Polish people, Russians, and Chinese people, and Indians from India, Native Americans. All of this brown, black and white has stolen the true identity of humanity and been used to categorize people so they can focus on their differences more than their similarities.
his is not the first time in American history where poor people have been led to believe they’re white and have also been led to believe that their problems are the result of Mexicans, Muslims and black people. It’s just a scapegoat technique to keep them confused and keep them from looking at their real enemies, who really propagate their state of disenfranchisement and major corporations like the president-elect. They’re just pawns in a bigger capitalist and imperialist game. Until we can regroup and re-identify the real issues in our society — which I think Bernie Sanders started to get people focused on — we’re gonna have all of this pointless fighting in this country that’s not taking us anywhere positive.
We can’t solve the problems of the poor by blaming other poor people. It’s not poor people taking each other’s jobs; it’s major corporations. It’s shipping companies overseas, technology changing and factory positions being done by machines. But, right now, it’s just a hoax. I feel like that’s gonna bring out the worst in a lot of people in America because hurt people hurt people. I know that. Some people in these small towns with heroin epidemics and lack of employment — they’re hurt — and the easiest way to approach that is to blame somebody of a different race; to blame “the others.” It’s a lot more difficult to identify the real structural issues that have us disenfranchised all across this nation. I think when you start getting at those things, that’s when the assassinations happen.