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Fifty stars and thirteen stripes Wavy patriotic mathematician do the math ... Subtraction or addition, what will the numbers be, 37 or 63? Slavery took away my parents’ human rights, and their children’s dignity I got 59 stripes to show what was done to me ... every year on this earth, I’ve seen my people mistreated wickedly Promises, promises was the number 40 plus 1 Forty acres and a mule Reparation was a cheap trade-off for my ancestors’s suffering and misery But, that promissory note still ain’t never been given to me Subtraction ends with a negative number obviously Minus zero is deeper than a 6 feet hole It’s so cold inside the modern slave quarters, the project pipes are froze Go bury the bones, now there’s less to feed — politicians playing oppression dominoes Moving over to the addition side of the patriotic math equation I got a lot of woe heaped on my poor poverty: more income inequality, more housing discrimination illegality More police brutality, and much, much more drugs pouring into every ghetto community Add it all up, this is what I see: red, white and blue platitudes is suffocating me Red is our labor paid with blood White is our cotton weary purity Blue is our ocean of perpetual grief But there’s more to the patriotic math problem, come take a look-see We got multiplication and division to intellectually wrestle with morally Stripping away health care and welfare has multiplied the cries of the poor Mob rule, and his thug buddy, crime does too ... gun violence got bodies piling up at the morgue Multiply the pain of parents whose kids go milk carton missing Spreading fear cancer in the affected area, killing hope The disease of apathy is multiplying faster than campaign corruption smoke Do the math you dope ... Depression numbers are climbing astronomically, higher than you can see in a Hubble space telescope Yet, it’s division that takes away most of the social gains garnered over the years Factor in the algorithms of hate, separating forces of social valency Divide the bond of racial harmony, cancel out certain colors in the voting crayon box Do the math ... and understand, division is a common denominator pox And last on the patriotic math problem list is fractions and percentages That’s how the Revolutionary colonies’ tax returns were itemized in the beginning Three fifths ... Sixty percent human Slaves were never counted to be worth much, tax write-off humans who were sub Back to the future with another tax cut And after all this time, they still be doing the same math with a king George touch, using Orwellian integers Strange, arcane math symbols and figures Do the math ... Some stars are more equal than others, some stripes are brighter than another Math numbers don’t lie, only Cain people who hate their brother
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