Which golden age do you mean?
The one where hands bled into cotton
and called it white gold,
where tea leaves steeped empires
on the sweat of Bengali hands,
where cardamom and cloves
mapped your trade route
on the maps of suffering,
where bananas bent republics to your will
and you named it commerce?
You, draped in pointed fabric,
clutching supremacy like inheritance,
calling extraction civilization,
calling theft discovery,
calling brutality the natural order —
The irony drips like molasses...
(produced where, by whom, remind me?)
Every avocado on your toast,
every metal in your phone,
every luxury that funds your leisure
to complain about the people
whose ancestors you commodified—
They are the leeches?
The hands that built your railroads,
picked your fruits, cleaned your houses,
raised your children while theirs went hungry,
survived your boots and your laws and your ropes—
They are extracting from you?
Show me the golden time:
Was it when lynching was a picnic?
When redlining was policy?
When separate meant unequal by design?
When accent determined destiny
and melanin measured worth?
Your "again" is a confession.
An admission that your greatness
required someone else's degradation,
that your height demanded
someone else be made small.
But here's the thing about foundations
built on stolen labor:
they remember.
The earth remembers.
The children remember.
And no white hood, however pointed,
can obscure the truth
that you have been the extraction,
the consumption,
the leech—
feeding on the world
while calling the feast
your birthright.
The revolution isn't coming.
It's already here,
in every person who refuses
to let you rewrite the ledger,
who knows that "great"
was never great for everyone,
who sees your nostalgia
for what it is:
a desire to consume again
without having to see
what you're eating.
Feb 7
Feb 7, 2026 at 11:58 AM UTC
Which golden age do you mean?
The one where hands bled into cotton
and called it white gold,
where tea leaves steeped empires
on the sweat of Bengali hands,
where cardamom and cloves
mapped your trade route
on the maps of suffering,
where bananas bent republics to your will
and you named it commerce?
You, draped in pointed fabric,
clutching supremacy like inheritance,
calling extraction civilization,
calling theft discovery,
calling brutality the natural order —
The irony drips like molasses...
(produced where, by whom, remind me?)
Every avocado on your toast,
every metal in your phone,
every luxury that funds your leisure
to complain about the people
whose ancestors you commodified—
They are the leeches?
The hands that built your railroads,
picked your fruits, cleaned your houses,
raised your children while theirs went hungry,
survived your boots and your laws and your ropes—
They are extracting from you?
Show me the golden time:
Was it when lynching was a picnic?
When redlining was policy?
When separate meant unequal by design?
When accent determined destiny
and melanin measured worth?
Your "again" is a confession.
An admission that your greatness
required someone else's degradation,
that your height demanded
someone else be made small.
But here's the thing about foundations
built on stolen labor:
they remember.
The earth remembers.
The children remember.
And no white hood, however pointed,
can obscure the truth
that you have been the extraction,
the consumption,
the leech—
feeding on the world
while calling the feast
your birthright.
The revolution isn't coming.
It's already here,
in every person who refuses
to let you rewrite the ledger,
who knows that "great"
was never great for everyone,
who sees your nostalgia
for what it is:
a desire to consume again
without having to see
what you're eating.
This poem is written to those who wear supremacy, whether in fabric or policy, in slogan or silence. It speaks to confront a specific delusion: that the architects of extraction can claim victimhood from those they've consumed.
