Branded black
Branded black
They told me,
"Get your paper, stack it high.
The higher the stack, the less they’ll see your skin."
But paper burns quick in the fire of eyes
that never forgot the chains,
only dressed them in silk ties and glass ceilings.
Freedom ain't free when the price tag's written in blood.
O.J. said, "I’m not Black, I’m O.J."
But the world ain’t blind;
it just picks who it wants to see.
Money don’t erase your reflection,
don’t blur the edges of your history,
don’t hide the shadow that follows you home.
You can shine like a diamond,
but the mine still digs through your bones.
They told us, "Stay in line."
But the line’s crooked,
twisted with lies dressed up as laws,
written by the same hands that lock us behind glass.
They teach us to run the race,
but they built the track with nails and bricks
and called it "progress."
You can race fast,
but the finish line moves
every time you think you got close.
We buy dreams sold by men
who build castles on our broken backs.
They dangle diamonds like lifelines,
teach us to measure wealth by what we wear,
not by what we keep.
So we spin rims,
sip bottles worth rent money,
and call it winning,
while the scoreboard still reads 400 to zero.
They taught us hustle,
but not equity.
Taught us grind,
but not ownership.
Taught us how to spend,
never how to hold.
The hood screams for reparations,
but the fine print reads,
“Pay yourself first, or pay the price forever.”
The price don’t go away.
It sticks to your skin,
like the scent of smoke after the fire’s gone out,
lingering, a ghost that sits in your room at night.
You buy the Benz,
but the key still rattles like the shackles they said were gone.
The mansion don’t change the truth.
They’ll see you as they see all of us
just another face in the crowd
waiting for the next headline.
Still, I move smart now.
Buy the block, not the bar.
Plant seeds in soil they called barren.
Teach my son the weight of his name
not just how to carry it,
but how to own it.
Teach my daughter her worth
ain’t measured by their scales,
but by the empire she builds from what they left behind.
Show them how to plant roots deep,
so when they look at the earth,
it remembers their hands,
not the ones that tried to erase them.
But money don’t bleach black.
It don’t mute the sirens,
don’t change the way they see me in the crosshairs.
I wear a suit,
but the trigger only sees a target.
I drive a Benz,
but the badge still sees a suspect.
Run the world,
but the world still runs its mouth:
“Still nigga.”
And that’s the curse.
No matter the climb,
there’s always a rope waiting at the top.
The news calls it "justice."
The streets call it "a warning."
I call it "a mirror."
Because when you look too long,
you see the truth.
ain’t nothing changed but the angle of the chains.
They gave us the rope,
but they forgot to cut us loose.
We got to work smarter,
be the ones who own the land
they told us we were never supposed to have.
Teach our children the value of their voice,
not the one they hear in the news,
but the one they find in the silence,
in the space where truth is born.
It’s in their hands,
the power to speak,
to build,
to break the walls
and see the world as we know it
not as they say it is.
So what’s left?
Legacy.
Not the kind you pass in diamonds or gold,
but in land, in love, in lessons.
The kind that breaks cycles
and turns bricks into bridges.
The kind that knows freedom ain’t in the dollar,
but in the power to decide where it goes.
The kind that knows the cost of a life
isn’t what you pay for it,
but what you leave behind.
Because shadows stretch long under the sun,
but they don’t have to weigh heavy.
And maybe one day,
the weight of all this pain
will stack into something unbreakable.
Until then,
we build.
We fight.
We teach.
And we carry the truth,
even when it feels too heavy to hold.
Because the price of shadows is steep,
but the light of our legacy will shine forever.
