Revolution #138, August 3, 2008
Check It Out
Oscar Brown Jr.’s
“Children of Children”
We received the following “Check It Out” from Michael Slate:
Someone recently called my attention to a poem I watched come to life in a living room in Riverside, California many years ago. It was “Children of Children” by the late poet, lyricist and singer Oscar Brown Jr. Oscar was writing, performing and rewriting this one piece all afternoon. He was on fire. He was working from something he had written before but he told me that it wasn’t quite there yet and he really needed to get it right. He thought this was something that had to be said, something that needed to be done and brought into the world, the quicker the better. Oscar talked about needing to say something about an emergency situation. Oscar loved young Black people; he loved their style, their bold defiance, their insight and daring and he especially loved the way hip hop brought all this together with a love of words and music. But he was worried about what was happening with Black youth in America—he always talked about the horror that life had become for these youth. And he was especially worried- actually angry- about all these people blaming the youth and preaching personal responsibility as the key to changing the situation. Oscar was a firm believer that these youth were trapped in an unjust system they needed to get out of.
So he wrote—like a fiend. He read it again and again. Some of my favorite lines were: “The children of children, while still young and sweet, all damned and programmed for future defeat./ The children of children are trapped by adults who fail them and jail them to hide the results./ The children of children, unable to cope with systems that twist them and rob them of hope.”
And when he was done he laughed and said that if this poem ever got out big there were going to be a whole lot of people mad at him and, maybe, a whole lot more loving what he said. Oscar wanted this poem to be a slap in the head, a wake-up call to get things right. And as the years went on he would often shout it out to the world. Check out his performance of the poem on Def Poetry Jam by searching YouTube for “Children of Children” and “Oscar Brown Jr.” In times like today where it is so broadly pronounced that Black youth are the problem and not the victims of the problem, Oscar’s poem speaks louder than ever before.
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