The first time I was introduced to the concept of being a “Child of America,” I was in my freestyling with a few guys in here. We started listening to a Tupac Shakur track that had began with an interview. Pac stated, “I’m your child America, you just can’t throw me away like that!” Immediately, I felt it. I understood it.

Previous to that occurrence, I had never considered the intricate part that the government may have played in the degradation of its own citizens…

Currently, being incarcerated – but determined to transcend my long standing past as a misguided black man in America, I took heavily to educating myself. I gravitated toward subjects like psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Between these subjects, I gained a greater understanding for society systemically, and revealed to myself the extent of governmental responsibility in the design of society, its social structures. It plays a key role in the success, or lack thereof, in the case of its citizens.

Just as I was not able to select to whom I was born, but love as an essential part of myself, I was unable to select to where I was born as well. But I am a patriot. I love America and consider myself a firm believer in its ideals of unity and equality.

Though I am a black man, and historically have more reasons than not to be suspect-able to the contrary, I, myself, do not take to the ideology that humankind is naturally evil. Nor do I subscribe to the notion that our leaders purposely design social structures to oppress any specific group of peoples.

Now, as I pace the corridors of the prison pods, I see great disparities in race and social status that is unavoidable. Could this be a product of a purposeful design I failed to recognize, or a deeply shameful neglect? Either or, there are people suffering. A great number of those people have grown up in the ‘Free World’ knowing nothing other than that suffering. Suffering, poverty, impoverished communities; and every bit of strife associated with such states… Criminal gangs, below standard schooling, and environments non-conducive to the development and cultivation of its youth… of its children…

Many of those children are in my demographic; populating the fenced in yards of the prison grounds littering the lands of the free, we know nothing more than what America has taught us. Miseducations and all… though we are taught that the American will is forged all the way down to its most lowly of citizens, it is evident that our governing body has some extent of responsibility to the state of its citizens as a whole… for we are its children…

-Q, Written 10/20/19