I’m here to tell you a story I stand
before you a man six foot two two legs
two arms two eyes that work two eyes the
work as we work towards this clean air
in my lungs no tuberculosis a carrier of
sickle cell a carrier only you’ve
probably seen me scratching from eczema
if you know me but my doctors could
always help me I’m born in the first
world I’m healthy but why is this maybe
I’m just lucky maybe because I prayed
Jesus cures the sick and the illness
went away maybe those who get sick
deserve it maybe they’re worthless maybe
they’ll enjoy it
maybe I’ll ignore it while you’re
popping your collar
cholera is killing many children men and
women and many more and your clean water
your body is a temple and what I mean by
that is like the temples of old it’s
built upon the bodies of the poor Body
Snatchers pill-popping disaster drugs
stronger and faster peel back the
plaster see what lies underneath trials
of the many as you wander through the
aisles of the pharmacy
Big Pharma gives trials to the desperate
to test it so you can rest slick with no
trials and no drama free pizza in
Nigeria meningitis strikes the Trojan
horse they sneak in and test proven a
drug meant for the EU in America white
lies a high price African children might
die they’ll die if we don’t trial it
anyway so what if it’s placebo tested
and might not be medicine do we really
have to tell they can just sign the form
no they live in a small village
somewhere in India and informed consent
law that sort of bit for more the mass
media feeding your Pharmaceuticals
Alabama’s got me so upset Tuskeegee
makes me lose my rest experiments in
untreated syphilis and death the guinea
pigs were the Negroes I mean come on
it’s the u.s. Jason’s father of
gynecology deciever experiments on black
slave
fixing fistula no anesthesia bodies of
blacks become cavitus for medical
advancement and yet the embargo cannot
prevent the preventative measures in
Cuba from flourishing operation
operation Health Guinea Bissau Haiti
q the Cuban doctors first world health
care in the third world back to the
States third world health care in the
first world United in our states of
sickness United in our states of health
divided in our wealth privatized health
care private eyesight advertised drugs
for privatized life the right to buy
life the right to sell fear where whites
outlive blacks by a number of years we
moved to the globe not years but decades
in global health wealthy Americans set
the agenda dollar bills grandstanding
philanthropy polio on the low but wait
opened the gates the foundations are
shaky seeds are sown Montaigne’s oh and
coca-cola investments grow and scatter
GM seeds and diabetes malnourishment and
mcdonald’s pepsi using the water
slaughtering the trees to feed the
developed world’s greed pushing out to
new markets heart disease developing
world obesity causing chronic disease
not just infectious over the top it’s
incestuous patented blockers and testers
and pills are expensive let’s sue
governments to protect antiretroviral
inventions injections after 9/11 the US
was so scared of anthrax it threatened
to breach the patent and stockpile cipro
hypocrisy there the exceptionalism never
mind the generics are made for a
fraction of the price one pill instead
of three a fraction
the lives saved HIV is profitable
business no money no cure no remission
talk of circumcision but compassion in
addition abstinent your Bible Belt
missions from spreading homophobia
below-the-belt bible pope condom condoms
transmission south and east africa
listen
colonial catholicism fundamentalists
believe despite the evidence faith
healers children without medicine in
lieu of the power of christ right no
denial South America and Zika virus is
just more lies and old man in Europe
says some nonsense and the poor die or a
born deformed microcephaly tiny heads
and stunted mind abortion illegal
contraception stigmatized indigenous
suicide in Canada
do or die before their colonial
counterparts is true that diabetes
ravishes aboriginals in Australia fauna
foreign paraphernalia Panama infant
mortality worse died too soon to be
condemned from birth on their own stolen
Earth maternity mortality disparities
imagine a woman in South Sudan there are
a thousand times more likely to die at
childbirth than a woman in Estonia the
AIDS crisis yes
blame and Becky yes blame the denialists
but denialists never hiked the prices of
the pills
shkreli is just the tip of the iceberg
its greed that has the right to kill I
remember sitting on the train on my way
to school Metro headlining Ebola strikes
again open up the page
day after day watching the headlines
what the papers say then I noticed
something strange how do we contain it
could the virus moved to the UK a
Scottish nurse is on the way back from
Sierra Leone but no news of those died
in each day West Africa is far
another part of the world those Guinean
boys and Liberian girls and not quite
important enough keep them away so they
can eat fruit bats and monkeys and play
with death light-skinned journalists
only want some information American
report to sensationalize the torch and
now I look back it seems strange I know
the way the US and the army to fight a
plague to contain the Africans to their
fate and then in the 95 outbreak plant
Mobutu give him aid thief colonial
corruption and grief Swiss bank accounts
juxtapose with disease sleaze
transfusion tables and recycled needles
war and Rwandan refugees you bleed with
Ebola bleed from your orifices you bleed
as they talk about your quarantine
quarantine and disaffection disaffected
rejected sanitary convention solidified
preventive measures patients or
criminals we don’t want the a sickness
to spread it’s difficult so we contain
them to you once contained as in
districts for blacks you know where
sickness ran rampant and children fell
flat quick you still contain them in
ghettos and townships your gated
compound your child sick the doctor
comes round quick in his air a rivas
uranium mines provide light for Paris
radioactive dust dispersed in the desert
the yellow kate takes the lungs of the
workers the cancer creeps and then
you’ve had it fanon in algeria
patients don’t trust their doctors why
because they’re on the other side would
you trust your oppressor with your life
Africa drumming and dancing and voodoo
traditional practitioners dismissed as
witches magician suspicions remedies are
cooked up in the kitchen so many doctors
who never listen and can only speak you
see the limbs
missing from our being all children but
you do not see the herbal remedies you
withhold modern medicine with your
predatory theft and demonize what the
people use to heal I’m a Negro who lives
in the land where the old get pacemakers
and artificial hearts yeah I know that
the land of the Negroes is full of
children who died as there’s poo in
their water the heart starts to falter
perhaps if I was born in nor licks
Russia I’d be deformed radiation breaks
the skin life expectancy thin birth
defects ten times more likely than your
average Russian nickel factory pushing
resistant TB prisons collapse of public
health in post-soviet states smallpox
had its day styling scars on his face
radiation zone alienation zone the town
of ghosts in Cherry noble haemophilia
and the nobles the Tsar’s scars scars
czars China 2002 a new disease news
blackouts propaganda cigars for the
princelings children of the government
who cover-up disease then go back to
fancy cars
big business those tobacco companies are
basically given out in those poor
countries you’re livid it’s a joke that
here it costs so much to smoke wake and
bake but are you woke taxation I wonder
did you know that little label that say
smoking is killing it’s a privilege not
everyone is given it the illiterate
can’t read the sign on the packet so the
government of Togo says perhaps we’ll
use a picture it’s a shame that the same
company you’re giving your fund to then
runs to Togo and delivers its threats of
legal action when its annual turnover
Dwarfs togo’s GDP figure the rest many
people in the third world don’t even
know when they smoke there very possibly
killing themselves so the next time you
read smoking kills remember that you get
to make a choice in your bill of health
in the supermarket all I see is a crime
scene I mean we won’t even talk about
wasted animal lives the truth is the
uses of food that surrounds me makes me
sick not in my stomach but my mind the
Common Agricultural Policy
is anything but common the European
subsidized so they can have cheap subs
and Fries bad news for the third world
privatized free market structurally
adjust your skeleton as you’re starving
while Senegalese fish become tuna for
Tibbles the cat nibble on that fill up
your fridge until it gets fat thoughts
of the hungry pushed to the back of your
mind and fill up your stomach sublime we
face four famines today Yemen Somalia
northern Nigeria South Sudan don’t
forget that if you can talk about
regulation children dying because of
food speculation Clinton and the
Haitians globalization people dispersed
health care workers flee from the third
world to the first flight to America
fill up your purse one less Filipino
nurse
people in remission remissions money
sent home to make sure medicines in the
kitchen fixing up that first world
salary by fixing the ailments of those
first worlds patients who keep mixing up
your name and the name of that other
colored nurse and talking about when
Britain was Britain when British people
on British streets 100 percent British
beef whatever that means and British
famines in colonial Bengal affecting
Indian kids British subjects no British
nutrition British oil interests in the
Biafran war kids with kwashiorkor
because of britain distended bellies and
jelly-like legs or the histories of
Britain’s enriching is sickening
history’s beyond what our library
teaches and Beyond letting blood and
applying leeches after Senna’s cannon
translated into latin a father of
european medicine in iran in the land of
the savage Imhotep architect and
physician in hieroglyphics it was
written bladder stones healed by Hindu
preachers lithotomy plants in the Holika
Joss Rita though history places Europe
at the census II smallpox ammunation in
China for millennia see only reaches
Europe in the 18th century and even then
you see physicians reacted skeptically
the women and the wounds that they have
sold it if I either al-islamiyya and her
fame days of treating fallen soldiers
talk of the future I see displacement
refugee camps
are the places where sickness can spread
I see sickness in your faces though the
scars are cleared
I see sickness in your racists
I see sickness in your greed I see
sickness in the way you consume so
others will need I see the blood on the
hands of those who never have known what
it is to bleed I see the blood on my
hands I see the trees I see the bats and
mosquitoes the thrive in warm climates
I see zoonotic disease I see the earth
get warmer as the sea levels ride small
children on which the malaria feeds I
see a lack of latrines
I see the sewage the poo the it the open
defecation into pits the water conflict
and the cholera Yemen getting bleaker
and the armed deals sold by the Brits
snails spread schizo so Malthus surgeons
enhancing people’s while children cannot
circle to emancipate it to give milk
I see the filth upon which the world
that you call developed was built
cataracts they cannot see completely
preventable disease they cannot see the
trees they cannot see the flowers or the
Leafs they cannot see the injustice
their blindness conceals only some get
the chance to self deceive only some get
the chance to self deceive only those
the look get to look away only some get
the chance to self deceive so that is a
poem that I wrote for this this talk I’m
gonna put it on a website called rap
genius with an annotated version by
tomorrow hopefully so that because
obviously with the poem like this you
have to find the balancing ground
between finding people in the room
obviously a medical professions and who
will get little references and then
obviously making something accessible so
that it’s obvious what you’re talking
about and then there’ll be some people
who want to kind of get the in jokes
between Russian nobility
outbreaks in China in 2002 and the rest
of it so I’m gonna put a annotated
version on rap genius if you go on the
website and then type in famine island a
TED talk London school or something
you’ll find it by tomorrow and then yeah
thank you
before you a man six foot two two legs
two arms two eyes that work two eyes the
work as we work towards this clean air
in my lungs no tuberculosis a carrier of
sickle cell a carrier only you’ve
probably seen me scratching from eczema
if you know me but my doctors could
always help me I’m born in the first
world I’m healthy but why is this maybe
I’m just lucky maybe because I prayed
Jesus cures the sick and the illness
went away maybe those who get sick
deserve it maybe they’re worthless maybe
they’ll enjoy it
maybe I’ll ignore it while you’re
popping your collar
cholera is killing many children men and
women and many more and your clean water
your body is a temple and what I mean by
that is like the temples of old it’s
built upon the bodies of the poor Body
Snatchers pill-popping disaster drugs
stronger and faster peel back the
plaster see what lies underneath trials
of the many as you wander through the
aisles of the pharmacy
Big Pharma gives trials to the desperate
to test it so you can rest slick with no
trials and no drama free pizza in
Nigeria meningitis strikes the Trojan
horse they sneak in and test proven a
drug meant for the EU in America white
lies a high price African children might
die they’ll die if we don’t trial it
anyway so what if it’s placebo tested
and might not be medicine do we really
have to tell they can just sign the form
no they live in a small village
somewhere in India and informed consent
law that sort of bit for more the mass
media feeding your Pharmaceuticals
Alabama’s got me so upset Tuskeegee
makes me lose my rest experiments in
untreated syphilis and death the guinea
pigs were the Negroes I mean come on
it’s the u.s. Jason’s father of
gynecology deciever experiments on black
slave
fixing fistula no anesthesia bodies of
blacks become cavitus for medical
advancement and yet the embargo cannot
prevent the preventative measures in
Cuba from flourishing operation
operation Health Guinea Bissau Haiti
q the Cuban doctors first world health
care in the third world back to the
States third world health care in the
first world United in our states of
sickness United in our states of health
divided in our wealth privatized health
care private eyesight advertised drugs
for privatized life the right to buy
life the right to sell fear where whites
outlive blacks by a number of years we
moved to the globe not years but decades
in global health wealthy Americans set
the agenda dollar bills grandstanding
philanthropy polio on the low but wait
opened the gates the foundations are
shaky seeds are sown Montaigne’s oh and
coca-cola investments grow and scatter
GM seeds and diabetes malnourishment and
mcdonald’s pepsi using the water
slaughtering the trees to feed the
developed world’s greed pushing out to
new markets heart disease developing
world obesity causing chronic disease
not just infectious over the top it’s
incestuous patented blockers and testers
and pills are expensive let’s sue
governments to protect antiretroviral
inventions injections after 9/11 the US
was so scared of anthrax it threatened
to breach the patent and stockpile cipro
hypocrisy there the exceptionalism never
mind the generics are made for a
fraction of the price one pill instead
of three a fraction
the lives saved HIV is profitable
business no money no cure no remission
talk of circumcision but compassion in
addition abstinent your Bible Belt
missions from spreading homophobia
below-the-belt bible pope condom condoms
transmission south and east africa
listen
colonial catholicism fundamentalists
believe despite the evidence faith
healers children without medicine in
lieu of the power of christ right no
denial South America and Zika virus is
just more lies and old man in Europe
says some nonsense and the poor die or a
born deformed microcephaly tiny heads
and stunted mind abortion illegal
contraception stigmatized indigenous
suicide in Canada
do or die before their colonial
counterparts is true that diabetes
ravishes aboriginals in Australia fauna
foreign paraphernalia Panama infant
mortality worse died too soon to be
condemned from birth on their own stolen
Earth maternity mortality disparities
imagine a woman in South Sudan there are
a thousand times more likely to die at
childbirth than a woman in Estonia the
AIDS crisis yes
blame and Becky yes blame the denialists
but denialists never hiked the prices of
the pills
shkreli is just the tip of the iceberg
its greed that has the right to kill I
remember sitting on the train on my way
to school Metro headlining Ebola strikes
again open up the page
day after day watching the headlines
what the papers say then I noticed
something strange how do we contain it
could the virus moved to the UK a
Scottish nurse is on the way back from
Sierra Leone but no news of those died
in each day West Africa is far
another part of the world those Guinean
boys and Liberian girls and not quite
important enough keep them away so they
can eat fruit bats and monkeys and play
with death light-skinned journalists
only want some information American
report to sensationalize the torch and
now I look back it seems strange I know
the way the US and the army to fight a
plague to contain the Africans to their
fate and then in the 95 outbreak plant
Mobutu give him aid thief colonial
corruption and grief Swiss bank accounts
juxtapose with disease sleaze
transfusion tables and recycled needles
war and Rwandan refugees you bleed with
Ebola bleed from your orifices you bleed
as they talk about your quarantine
quarantine and disaffection disaffected
rejected sanitary convention solidified
preventive measures patients or
criminals we don’t want the a sickness
to spread it’s difficult so we contain
them to you once contained as in
districts for blacks you know where
sickness ran rampant and children fell
flat quick you still contain them in
ghettos and townships your gated
compound your child sick the doctor
comes round quick in his air a rivas
uranium mines provide light for Paris
radioactive dust dispersed in the desert
the yellow kate takes the lungs of the
workers the cancer creeps and then
you’ve had it fanon in algeria
patients don’t trust their doctors why
because they’re on the other side would
you trust your oppressor with your life
Africa drumming and dancing and voodoo
traditional practitioners dismissed as
witches magician suspicions remedies are
cooked up in the kitchen so many doctors
who never listen and can only speak you
see the limbs
missing from our being all children but
you do not see the herbal remedies you
withhold modern medicine with your
predatory theft and demonize what the
people use to heal I’m a Negro who lives
in the land where the old get pacemakers
and artificial hearts yeah I know that
the land of the Negroes is full of
children who died as there’s poo in
their water the heart starts to falter
perhaps if I was born in nor licks
Russia I’d be deformed radiation breaks
the skin life expectancy thin birth
defects ten times more likely than your
average Russian nickel factory pushing
resistant TB prisons collapse of public
health in post-soviet states smallpox
had its day styling scars on his face
radiation zone alienation zone the town
of ghosts in Cherry noble haemophilia
and the nobles the Tsar’s scars scars
czars China 2002 a new disease news
blackouts propaganda cigars for the
princelings children of the government
who cover-up disease then go back to
fancy cars
big business those tobacco companies are
basically given out in those poor
countries you’re livid it’s a joke that
here it costs so much to smoke wake and
bake but are you woke taxation I wonder
did you know that little label that say
smoking is killing it’s a privilege not
everyone is given it the illiterate
can’t read the sign on the packet so the
government of Togo says perhaps we’ll
use a picture it’s a shame that the same
company you’re giving your fund to then
runs to Togo and delivers its threats of
legal action when its annual turnover
Dwarfs togo’s GDP figure the rest many
people in the third world don’t even
know when they smoke there very possibly
killing themselves so the next time you
read smoking kills remember that you get
to make a choice in your bill of health
in the supermarket all I see is a crime
scene I mean we won’t even talk about
wasted animal lives the truth is the
uses of food that surrounds me makes me
sick not in my stomach but my mind the
Common Agricultural Policy
is anything but common the European
subsidized so they can have cheap subs
and Fries bad news for the third world
privatized free market structurally
adjust your skeleton as you’re starving
while Senegalese fish become tuna for
Tibbles the cat nibble on that fill up
your fridge until it gets fat thoughts
of the hungry pushed to the back of your
mind and fill up your stomach sublime we
face four famines today Yemen Somalia
northern Nigeria South Sudan don’t
forget that if you can talk about
regulation children dying because of
food speculation Clinton and the
Haitians globalization people dispersed
health care workers flee from the third
world to the first flight to America
fill up your purse one less Filipino
nurse
people in remission remissions money
sent home to make sure medicines in the
kitchen fixing up that first world
salary by fixing the ailments of those
first worlds patients who keep mixing up
your name and the name of that other
colored nurse and talking about when
Britain was Britain when British people
on British streets 100 percent British
beef whatever that means and British
famines in colonial Bengal affecting
Indian kids British subjects no British
nutrition British oil interests in the
Biafran war kids with kwashiorkor
because of britain distended bellies and
jelly-like legs or the histories of
Britain’s enriching is sickening
history’s beyond what our library
teaches and Beyond letting blood and
applying leeches after Senna’s cannon
translated into latin a father of
european medicine in iran in the land of
the savage Imhotep architect and
physician in hieroglyphics it was
written bladder stones healed by Hindu
preachers lithotomy plants in the Holika
Joss Rita though history places Europe
at the census II smallpox ammunation in
China for millennia see only reaches
Europe in the 18th century and even then
you see physicians reacted skeptically
the women and the wounds that they have
sold it if I either al-islamiyya and her
fame days of treating fallen soldiers
talk of the future I see displacement
refugee camps
are the places where sickness can spread
I see sickness in your faces though the
scars are cleared
I see sickness in your racists
I see sickness in your greed I see
sickness in the way you consume so
others will need I see the blood on the
hands of those who never have known what
it is to bleed I see the blood on my
hands I see the trees I see the bats and
mosquitoes the thrive in warm climates
I see zoonotic disease I see the earth
get warmer as the sea levels ride small
children on which the malaria feeds I
see a lack of latrines
I see the sewage the poo the it the open
defecation into pits the water conflict
and the cholera Yemen getting bleaker
and the armed deals sold by the Brits
snails spread schizo so Malthus surgeons
enhancing people’s while children cannot
circle to emancipate it to give milk
I see the filth upon which the world
that you call developed was built
cataracts they cannot see completely
preventable disease they cannot see the
trees they cannot see the flowers or the
Leafs they cannot see the injustice
their blindness conceals only some get
the chance to self deceive only some get
the chance to self deceive only those
the look get to look away only some get
the chance to self deceive so that is a
poem that I wrote for this this talk I’m
gonna put it on a website called rap
genius with an annotated version by
tomorrow hopefully so that because
obviously with the poem like this you
have to find the balancing ground
between finding people in the room
obviously a medical professions and who
will get little references and then
obviously making something accessible so
that it’s obvious what you’re talking
about and then there’ll be some people
who want to kind of get the in jokes
between Russian nobility
outbreaks in China in 2002 and the rest
of it so I’m gonna put a annotated
version on rap genius if you go on the
website and then type in famine island a
TED talk London school or something
you’ll find it by tomorrow and then yeah
thank you
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