Lauryn Hill started serving her three month sentence for tax evasion this weekend, but, before she left for jail, she had a few things she wanted to say about the IRS and did so on her Tumblr page. First of all, everyone agrees she owed the taxes on $1.8M in earnings, so I'm not sure how slavery and racism played a part in her having to pay taxes. Everyone has to pay taxes. She had not paid any, despite earning $2M, but because she did have to pay them, she thinks the IRS is being racist? I don't get it and think that she has entered the Marley hot box one too many times.
"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, criminalizing the traumatized, 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, brutalize 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."
If you would like to read the entire thing, you can
read it here.