2 Different

We don’t live in the same America.

There’s the one they built on paper,

and the one we built out of survival.

Theirs has inheritance,

ours has resilience.

They say “it was a long time ago,”

but Ruby Bridges is still alive.

The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn’t a rumor,

it was law.

The Civil Rights Act wasn’t ancient history

it’s someone’s mother’s memory,

someone’s father’s childhood.

My father was born without the right to vote.

He grew up learning what it meant to earn humanity.

And me?

I’m the first generation of women in my line

allowed to open a bank account

without a man’s signature …

and they call that progress.

They say “just work hard.”

But how do you climb a ladder

when the floor’s still tilted?

When they nailed it down with red lines

and called it property value?

When the schools that were supposed to save us

were funded by the zip codes that kept us poor?

They call that merit.

I call it mathematics of oppression.

We watched them mourn the Great Depression

like it was the end of the world.

But for us,

it was just another Tuesday.

You can’t lose what you were never allowed to own.

Black folks weren’t even permitted to open bank accounts.

We couldn’t fall from grace

we were never invited into that space.

And still, they told us to smile.

To speak properly.

To be grateful for crumbs that came with strings.

They called it professionalism,

but it sounded a lot like erasure.

They said “articulate,”

and meant “sound white.”

They said “calm down,”

when we spoke truth.

They said “you’re intimidating,”

when we stood tall.

Even love isn’t neutral here.

When I date someone who isn’t a person of color,

I can feel the difference.

Some stand beside me

they listen, they hold space,

they learn the language of silence.

But others …

they flinch at my pain.

They shrink from my rage,

or worse … they study it like an exhibit.

They make jokes when they think I can’t hear,

or when he’s not looking.

And sometimes,

they’re bold enough to say it to his face …

expecting him not to understand.

Microaggressions dressed like compliments,

racism wrapped in laughter.

It’s a quiet kind of violence

that leaves no bruise

but still stains the air.

They tell us to assimilate

to bleach not just our hair,

but our skin and our being.

To trade rhythm for respectability.

To make ourselves smaller

so they can feel safe.

But you can’t heal inside a house built on harm.

We can’t patch the cracks with our silence.

We have to unlearn the lies they called education.

We have to remove their lens

from our reflection.

We stop treating their comfort as a compass.

We stop measuring worth

by how well we mimic

Deconditioning means remembering

we were whole before being told we were broken.

It meant choosing truth over peace

and authenticity over approval.

It means standing in a room

that wasn’t built for our voices

and refusing to whisper.

Because we were never meant

to fit into their version of order.

We were meant to build our own.

A system where our rhythm isn’t unprofessional.

Where rage isn’t criminal.

Where existing while brown

isn’t called resistance

it’s called being.

Deconditioning isn’t rebellion.

It’s recovery.

It’s the moment we wake up

and realize the problem was never us.

It was the world that told our reflection to hush

when it was only telling the truth.