- When the cancer comes,
the experts will gather they will say things like,
I'm afraid this bad news.
This is not a death sentence.
People live long and normal lives,
we are doing everything we can
but there is not an exact science to this.
You will hear,
bad news.
This is a death sentence.
You will think to yourself,
we are everything, but not this.
Cancer is when the abnormal cells grow
and spread very quickly.
Sometimes these cells group together forming tumors
causing damage to the healthy body.
Often these cells break apart causing damage
to other parts of the healthy body,
and this is the best definition
of gentrification that I have.
I live in Oakland, where they're tearing down
old black bodies quicker
than they can build up new high rises.
Death by crooked cop or crooked crane, it's all the same.
Gentrification is killing us.
When the New Oakland residents call the cops
on the Drum Circle filled with people of colour.
They're trying to stop the black heartbeat
when they call the cops on the Black Church,
which had been there for 65 years
for being too loud on a Sunday.
They are trying to strip Oakland and it's soul
to gentrify is to take the body and gut it
it is to treat the entire city like a Chop House,
and those butchers have no manners.
They do not pray over the slaughtered,
they do not even have the decency
to make use of the entire carcass.
They simply toss out the bones
as if there is no need to season the stock.
There is no God in this.
My stepfather was a pastor,
and before that he was a football coach,
and before that he was a truck driver
who deliver food items.
He was a man who took care of those who are not his own.
He was Ahah yellow man, or a patient father who sang like
he tried to call the cattle home.
He thought his voice was better than what it was,
(laughing)
and we let him sing anyway.
Because we knew that his voice would go the same way
of the house he raised us in.
Our memory, no longer ours and no longer here.
When my mother called me to tell me of his Lymphoma,
that he has three months left to live.
I immediately thought of the newly built
mixed income housing high rise just up the street.
I thought to myself, the city does not care
that the lower income families in that high rise
will never be able to afford the $5 cup of coffee
or to shop at the whole foods.
The city does not care that the body will never be whole,
or that the body has a family.
The city does not care about black families
that the only place they have ever called home
will be made to feel strange and foreign and out of place
that we become too expensive to even breathe in this rate,
we will have to lower our dead into grounds,
they could not afford to live on at some point.
mixed income housing only prolongs the inevitable
and this is the best definition of Chemotherapy that I have.
Meanwhile, my stepfather died and no one seemed
to ask the important questions like
how did we get here and why did the body eat itself alive
and where did the God go and all of this?
I am a broken prayer, and a burned down Church House
without him I never would have made it which is to say,
I am black and I feel scared,
and this is exactly what the cancer does.
It pushes the God out of the body
and sometimes the body has neighborhoods, four limbs,
which is to say,
when I played football for him, you know,
and we lost our semi-final game
and I made my fist into two small wrecking balls
waiting for any project to get into.
He said,"Yeah, I know this hurts,
cry it out if you have to but you got
to keep your head up, you know?
"Figure out a way to get him next time," he said.
He has everything I know about gentrification.
Everything I can tell you about
what happens in the cancer finally comes.
(applauding)