American history is not a passive collection of facts, dates, or dusty names stacked in sterile textbooks. It’s a battlefield. A weaponized narrative. A cleverly camouflaged lie dressed in the illusion of truth — especially when it concerns Black people. Gil Scott-Heron knew that. And in 1982, with nothing but his voice and a mic, he tore the mask off that illusion in his poem “His Story.”
This isn’t just a tribute. This is a translation for today’s reader. Not because Gil’s words aren’t timeless — they are — but because the players have upgraded their costumes, the script is slicker, and the lies have WiFi.
I’ve often stared into the shattered mirror of America’s history books and wondered, “How did they get away with this?” I mean the boldness — the audacity — of erasing entire civilizations with a sentence. They called it discovery, as if the millions already living there were ghosts waiting to be conjured by pale hands.
In Gil’s words, “White folks discovered Africa,” and like magic, the presence of Africans themselves was nullified. Cecil Rhodes didn’t invade, exploit, or rob — no, he civilized. He simply saw a land "with no one there," never mind the empires, the culture, the gold-gilded thrones of Mali, the libraries of Timbuktu, or the spiritual wisdom passed through generations in languages more ancient than Latin.
They said Africans weren’t civilized because they didn’t write things down. But scrolls rotted when mouths carried memory. They didn’t wear clothes in the way Europeans did — so their nakedness became a license for judgment. Never mind why they didn’t wear clothes — the climate, the culture, the freedom of their own skin. None of that mattered to those who came with their holy books in one hand and chains in the other.
Gil reminded us that “righteous white folks covered their eyes,” offended by what they saw, never once questioning whether their perspective was skewed. Because civilization, as they defined it, was always coded in whiteness, in conquest, in the ink of those who wielded the pen and the gun.
And that’s the heart of this lie: The history we’ve been taught is not a reflection — it’s a projection. A carefully curated tale of benevolent colonizers and savage natives, of progress justified by bloodshed, of maps rewritten by merchants and missionaries. The crimes were sanitized, the resistance rebranded. When the colonized rose up, it wasn’t called revolution — it was labeled “guerrilla warfare,” a euphemism to avoid admitting that people were simply reclaiming what was stolen.
Gil saw through all of this.
He caught the slight of hand when “underdeveloped” nations became “mineral rich,” when borders shifted not by tectonic plates but by political convenience. Libya and Egypt — once pillars of Africa — were scooted off into the “Middle East,” because it’s easier to sell stolen goods when you’ve changed the labels. And yet, the rhythm of erasure keeps time like a drum we refuse to hear.
What Gil offered in “His Story” wasn’t just critique. It was correction. A call to unearth the bones beneath the monuments, to reclaim the narrative that was snatched from our tongues. He was stitching back the truth that had been unraveled.
And today, we still need that psychological mending.
Because Black youth are still being told they come from nothing. That their story began in chains, not kingdoms. That resistance is aggression. That survival is savagery. That protest is provocation. And that our story — our real story — is someone else’s property to footnote, fictionalize, or forget.
But it isn't.
It’s ours. And it is not “His Story.” It is our memory. Our truth. Our legacy.
So when I write — whether about metaphysics, the weight of ancestral pain, or the way systems have learned to whisper instead of shout — I write with Gil’s fire in my chest. Because history may have been written by the victors, but truth? Truth is lived by the survivors.
So no —this ain’t His Story. It’s ours.
Not written in textbooks,
but tattooed in bloodlines,
whispered in drumbeats,
buried beneath cotton fields,
and carried in the backs of mothers
who walked through fire
just so their children could breathe.
Gil gave us the blueprint.
I’m just adding coals to the fire.
‘Cause history may have been written
by the ones who held the pen…
But truth?
Truth was lived by the ones who bore the chains. And we’re still here. Still rising. Still writing.
Now—it's our turn to tell it.
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