We're All Mississippi Now

They used to point at us on maps, a place to leave behind,

a cautionary tale for the sophisticated mind.

They talked about our poverty, our stubborn, sinful pride,

the slow and sleepy river where the nation's progress died.

We were the dark and troubled heart, the wound that wouldn't heal,

a place apart from everyone, too broken to be real.

We were the problem they could measure, the sorrow they could name,

the board on which they played their self-congratulatory game.

They'd say, "Thank God we're not like them, thank God we've moved ahead"

while they were listenin' to our music and sleepin' in our beds.

Of stories that we told 'em, of the blues that we had bled;

they never understood a single goddamn word we said.

'Cause the floodwaters are rising past the Mason-Dixon line,

and that shadow that you pitied is a shadow you now find

is fallin' on your own town, your school, your sacred vow.

Congratulations, darlin', we're all Mississippi now.

You woke up one bright morning and the laws felt strange and old,

and the rights you took for granted had been auctioned off and sold.

Your neighbor started lookin' at your kids a different way,

and the words you couldn't fathom, you were hearin' every day.

That same old fear we've tasted, that same old bitter pill

of a minority of angry men who bend the world to their own will

is poisoning your water, it's seeping in your ground,

the same old silent treatment in your once-progressive town.

So welcome to the struggle, we've kept a seat for you;

welcome to the place where just your breathing is a thing you have to fight to do.

There is no more "us and them," there is no "there and here";

there's only all of us together in this atmosphere of fear.

'Cause the floodwaters are rising past the Mason-Dixon line,

and that shadow that you pitied is a shadow you now find is

fallin' on your own town, your school, your sacred vow.

Congratulations, darlin', we're all Mississippi now.