Vanity Slave - Kendrick Lamar
So I fast forward, then I rewind A time machine can help me double back to slavery times Picking cotton from a field that a white man own The blacker you are, farther you're from the white man's home Negro spiritual songs, gave us some type of sanity Before your vanity, they parted our families They put us in hundred degree shade and outside we bathed The more we were afraid, the more they made rules And trapped our minds in a cage, our freedom was so vague Couldn't see it with the eyes of Tracee Ross (uh) And school was exempt, see we couldn't have smarts And a smirk could get you hurt, wounded first from a scar 400 years of nothing, 400 years of suffering 400 years of tears, and tribulations, miseducation See what we facing is now coming back to the roots Remember whips on our back and if we would run they would shoot Called us niggers and figured that we never live in pursuit Of happiness, we capture these feelings in things that we do Thought of abstinence of slavery but we made it come to I said the 400 years we never had nothing Barely had clothes on our back Is the reason why when we get a little bit of change We over exaggerate on our living expenses So if you get your first big check and you cop a chain before you buy a house You're a vanity slave If you're a female and you got 4,5,6 rings on your finger Four holes in your left ear and a nose piercing You're a vanity slave
