Abortion is an ancient practice and can be outlawed but will never go away.

The “land of the free” reference is to the popular concept of America expressed in “The Star-spangled Banner”.

He says “Not me,” – it’s not a free land with oppressive abortion restrictions still out there.

There is a long history to this phrase, but the concept received perhaps its most popular expression in Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The lyrics below were in fact taken from a speech by Marcus Garvey, whose Black Star shipping line was taken by the Kewli and Def as the name of their rap duo.

“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFGgbT_VasI

The also goes back to The Bluest Eye. In the novel, black children lose their ability to think for themselves after they encounter white culture and the things they are supposed to think. For instance, Claudia originally hates Shirley Temple and white baby dolls because she cannot connect with them, but she grows to love them and blue eyes when she realizes they are “beautiful” and she is not. She is practically brain washed by these overarching opinions that she constantly encounters. She loses the joy in her own “funkiness” and dirtiness to be clean and controlled like all of the white children.

A witty addition to Morrison’s litany in the original list of doublets in The Bluest Eye:

…we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.

Here, Def suggests the “exciting” nature of mainstream rap is not truly “live”; it’s just a form of entertainment, performing to entertain the oppressor, which isn’t really living at all.

In Morrison’s novel, the full sentence remixed here reads:

“We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.”

For Black Star, as for Morrison, living life according to the “law of the bluest eye,” following white American standards of beauty and behavior, is a kind of “social death.”

A “thief in the night” is also a biblical reference for an unforeseeable and tragic event:

“But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.” (2 Peter 3:10)

The suggestion here is that the official history of the American education system is just one-side of a story.

stic.man knows something of an alternate history, growing up black in America and tries to school his teacher on it.