Chorus

Chains don’t rust, they just change how they bind,

from the whip to the wage, from the body to the mind.

They drew lines in the sand, now we living in the lines,

segregated by design, call it progress in disguise.

still we rise, still we fight through the pain we inherit,

every scar got a story, every wound got a spirit.

they can bury the past, but the roots still grow—

chains don’t rust… they just hide below.

Verse 1

packed tight in the hull where the sunlight was a rumor,

names stripped off our tongues, turned souls into consumers.

auction blocks echoed numbers over names,

families torn apart just to fuel an empire’s gains.

sugar fields, cotton rows, blood stitched in the soil,

every harvest got a history of invisible toil.

language lost in the lash, culture buried in chains,

now the trauma live forever, passed down in the veins.

They wrote laws to legitimize the theft and the trade,

built a world off the backs of the lives they enslaved.

took a continent’s wealth, called it “civilized aid,”

Now the roots of that system still shaping the game.

from the ships to the scripts, they rewrote who we be,

turned identity to property, erased ancestry.

But the drums never died, they just changed how they speak—from the rhythm in the chains to the truth that we seek.

Chorus

Chains don’t rust, they just change how they bind,

from the whip to the wage, from the body to the mind.

They drew lines in the sand, now we living in the lines,

segregated by design, call it progress in disguise.

still we rise, still we fight through the pain we inherit,

every scar got a story, every wound got a spirit.

they can bury the past, but the roots still grow—

chains don’t rust… they just hide below.

Verse 2

Colonial maps carved the land with a blade,

split tribes into borders that were never our ways.

resources extracted, leaving poverty behind,

now the wealth in the west, but the struggle intertwined.

They built schools to reshape how we think and behave,

taught us more ‘bout their kings than the ones that we raised.

language switched, names flipped, heritage blurred,

now we searching for identity in fragments of words.

segregation in the cities, different sides of the street,

opportunity divided, same hustle, less to eat.

system set to suppress, dressed up as reform,

but the storm still the same, just a different uniform.

Neo-colonial ties got the markets controlled,

loans wrapped in chains, got the future on hold.

still they call it development while the debt multiplies,

and the gap keep widening between truth and the lies.

Now it’s suits and policies instead of shackles and ships,

but the power still concentrated in the same kind of grips.

media shaping perception, painting narratives skewed,

criminalizing the struggle while exploiting the truth.

from the prisons to the pipelines, same pattern repeat,

different tools, same goal—keep control of the weak.

but the youth waking up, putting truth in the air,

reclaiming every piece that was stripped from our care.

we investing in ourselves, building bridges from pain,

turning knowledge into power, breaking mental constraints.

from the ashes of the past, we rewriting the code,

every step toward freedom is a crack in the mold.

we remember, we resist, we restore what was lost,

count the price of oppression, now we tally the cost.

‘cause the future in our hands, and the story ain’t done—

from the chains that they forged… we becoming the sun.