While before Strummer imitated the soldiers and citizens telling the children to go to hell, here the line leads into an extended instrumental, reflecting the mothers' feelings. They want their children to be happy, but know there is nothing in their power they can do to help, leaving them incapable of speaking.

An alternate way to take this is that the mother is speaking after the interlude, which could be the mother’s thinking of how to respond. In this case, trying to tell the children that the American’s are wild, crazed, druggies, and that even if the children were let in to the US there is no home for them there. The culture is too foreign.

Perhaps it’s a bit of both. The mothers know they won’t be able to provide the life their children are asking, and after being unsure of how to respond, decide that the best way is to convince the children, and maybe even themselves, that that life wouldn’t actually be any better.

Vietnamese/American, or Amerasian children, want to go home with their fathers and to a better life, but are told to “Go straight to hell, boy”/“We don’t care about you” by the men.

This reflects not only the soldiers' attitude, but the attitude Americans in general and the U.S. government had to the Vietnamese/American children.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq1KeyEARBU

Common juxtaposes the stereotypical mob, famously portrayed in the movie Frankenstein and a common fear mongering tactic used by the Ku Klux Klan, and the Olympics, in which runners carry a torch around the world prior to the games, symbolically lighting the way to peace.

By switching from marching to running, he says that the peaceful protests will do more to advance their cause than the violent mobs.

The marching could alternately be a nod to previous civil rights movements, like the March on Washington, a famous peaceful protest. In this sense, Common is saying they’ll continue the work of those that came before them.

While the title of the song most obviously refers to Cole’s native home of Fayetteville and his adoptive home of New York, it could also refer to how one city can seem like two completely different places to different people. In this case, as shown by the hooks, one person is the one who got robbed and the other is the robber.

Her sister on the other line talking to her shoes

This might be the best storytelling I’ve ever heard from J. Cole, and that’s saying something. I chose the quote above because I feel it embodies a lot of what makes this verse so great. It’s brief and Cole is describing a small action, but both of those things make it all the more powerful. The verse itself is describing a fairly large–though unfortunately common–action, but Cole’s descriptions of these small parts serve to make these characters and thus their pain real to the listener, rather than being able to divorce themselves and know that these people are just fictitious characters.

We raising babies up in Hades where there ain’t no hope

This might be Cole’s angriest verse ever. He straight up calls out the president. I know other rappers have, but still, damn! This also makes it unusual for him, as it’s much more overtly political than he normally is. But it works out great. There’s so much anger in every one of his lines and you can empathize with everything he’s saying.