The Legitimate Heir

I do not trust Modern Medicine.
My distrust is not born of ignorance, but of history—a history written in the bodies of the forgotten.

1. It was built on slave practices. The foundations of American gynecology rest on the non-consensual surgeries performed by J. Marion Sims on enslaved Black women like Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. Their pain was the price of medical “progress.”

2. It is often devoid of compassion, run by overworked staff and fractured by bias. In emergency rooms and clinics, Black patients’ pain is systematically under-treated, their symptoms dismissed as exaggeration. We are seen as cases, not as people.

3. Medicine was not created for us or with us in mind. From the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where Black men were left to suffer and die untreated, to the ongoing maternal mortality crisis that disproportionately claims Black mothers—the system has repeatedly shown that our well-being is optional.

When I voice these truths, they are often reduced to paranoia. An overactive imagination.
But I am not paranoid when there is clear proof of neglect.
I am not imagining profits over life when nonprofit hospitals sue poor patients and for-profit networks prioritize shareholder returns.

These are the truths of my reality as The Legitimate Heir.
I am the heir to a stolen legacy—to healers, herbalists, and midwives whose knowledge was erased or criminalized, then rebranded and used for profit. I was built for a world that honored community care, that saw health as wholeness, not a transaction. A world where healing was woven into the fabric of culture, not confined to sterile rooms.

But that world was dismantled.
And this world is not my friend.
But I am still here—not built for this world, and growing anyways.

I am weed.
Daring to rise through the cracks of neglect.
Thriving where I am not wanted.
Persistent, resilient, rooted in a truth this system tries to pave over.

I am weed.
I need no permission to grow.
No approval to exist.
My roots remember what this world tries to forget.

So let them call me paranoid.
Let them dismiss the proof they refuse to see.
My trust is not theirs to earn—my growth is not theirs to control.

I am weed
And from this broken ground, I rise—
Raw.
Real.
Regal.
Eternal.