Singer Lauryn Hill expressed her frustrations with the IRS in a lengthy open letter she published just one day before beginning her three-month prison sentence for tax evasion.
Hill, 37, who compared her time in the music business to the slavery her ancestors endured, was sentenced time after the judge found her guilty of failing to pay $1.8 million in taxes over the past ten years. The Huffington Post reported that Hill attributed her exit from the music business to poor treatment, defending her failure to pay her taxes as a way to protect both herself and her six children.
"There were veiled threats, there was blacklisting," she said, without giving specifics. "I was told, `That's how it goes, it comes with the territory.' I came to be perceived as a cash cow and not a person. When people capitalize on a persona, they forget there is a person in there."
Now, as the rapper and singer begins her three-month sentence, Rolling Stone reports Hill has published a scathing condemnation of the IRS on her Tumblr . In the open letter, she claims that the history of enslavement of black people is directly tied to the conduct of the IRS.
“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,” Hill rants in the post. “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?”
Accusing the IRS of using “veiled coercion, and psychological torment” to imprison and constrict black people, Hill says it is all she can do not to become enraged, saying in the rant that the only way she can cope is by continuing to produce music that centers around love. The IRS, Hill argues is an institution void of sensitivity that has unfortunately become a higher authority.
“To me it is obvious that the accumulation of generational trauma and abuse have created the very behaviors the system tries to punish, by providing no sufficient outlets for the victims of institutional terror,” Hill concludes. “Clearly, the institution seeks to hide its own criminal history at the expense and wholeness of the abused, who 'acting out' from years of abuse and mistreatment, reflect the very aggression that they were exposed to.”
Image: Wikimedia Commons