What_Did_We_Do_to_Yall_Poem_on_Black_Survival_and_Resistance_08-16 17-26-28

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 22:27:00 +0000

What did Black people do to deserve centuries of enslavement, segregation, violence, discrimination, and hatred?

What did we do to y’all?

This spoken-word piece travels through the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggles that continue into the present day. But this is not simply a poem about suffering.

It is about survival.

It is about a people who turned sorrow into blues, struggle into jazz, oppression into community, and generations of pain into an unbreakable determination to exist.

They tried to make us history.

We became the future.

This piece was inspired by the words and commentary of @ashleythebaroness, whose powerful question about the hatred Black people have endured simply for existing planted the seed for this poem. I gratefully acknowledge her as the inspiration that caused me to take that question through our history and into this spoken-word piece.