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Artist News Legal
Lauryn Hill posts political polemic ahead of tax bill jail sentence
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 1 July 2013
As she began a three month jail term relating to unpaid taxes, Lauryn Hill this weekend posted a lengthy open letter to Tumblr considering the notion of ‘reverse racism’, and the impact centuries of discriminatory government, colonialism and slavery has had on the modern world. The polemic then comes round to Hill’s own current conflict with the establishment (aka the US Internal Revenue Service), though the specific allegations she is making against her prosecutors and the court that jailed her aren’t entirely clear.
But Hill writes: “I shuddered during sentencing when I kept hearing the term ‘make the IRS whole’… make the IRS whole, knowing that I got into these very circumstances having to deal with the very energies of inequity and resistance that created and perpetuated these savage inequalities. The entire time, I thought, who has made black people whole?! Who has made recompense for stealing, imposing, lying, murdering, criminalising the traumatised, taking them against their wills, destroying their homes, dividing their communities, ‘trying’ to steal their destinies, their time, stagnating their development, I could go on and on”.
“Has America, or any of the nations of the world guilty of these atrocities, ever made black people or Africa whole, or do they continue to sit on them, control them, manipulate them, cage them, rob them, brutalise them, subject them to rules that don’t apply to all? Use language, veiled coercion, and psychological torment like invisible fences to keep them locked into a pattern of limitation and therefore control by others. You have to remain focused to cease from rage”.
“The prosecutor, who was a woman, made a statement during sentencing about me not doing any charity work for a number of years during my ‘exile’. A) Charity work is not a requirement, but something done because someone wants to. I was clearly doing charitable works way before other people were even thinking about it. And B) Even the judge had to comment that she, meaning I, was both having and raising children during this period. As if that was not challenging enough to do. She sounded like the echo of the grotesque slave master, who expected women to give birth while in the field, scoop the baby up, and then continue to work. Disgusting”.
Read the full letter here.
