Video Transcript: What are Your Life Tattoos?

My story begins kind of like it's a fish out of water story. Even though I was born  in South Central LA, my particular story starts 20 minutes outside of that in the  San Grove Valley in West Covina La Puente area. So I grew up in like, an all  Mexican, like, super violent neighborhood. I didn't even know it was as  dangerous as it was. I just thought that that's just how people live. My neighbor's house became a crack house, like, I didn't know that. I just knew they didn't turn  on their electricity, and I thought it was like camping, like they're, you know, they  cook with candles, but no crack. I was the one black kid being teased because  of my color, getting chased home, getting banged on when you walking home.  Like, where you from me? I'm like, and I recognize homie. Like, I'm like, Paco  man, like, I live two streets from you. What are you talking about? And then even when we moved out to the suburbs, even there, again, like that was a  predominantly Caucasian neighborhood, and we were the poor kids that just  moved in, and just these weird black people that spoke Spanish, you know, I'm  saying, and like, they just couldn't, they didn't get us. And even down the street  at the church we went to for some reason, for me, I was getting convicted, like I  feel like God has split this roof open and is talking to me directly. But the guys  that were my age, I remember them not being affected at all. But it just tripped  me out, because, like I felt like nobody else felt like that. But in my mind, it went  back to just same way I grew up. Well, I've been the only my whole life. So if I'm  gonna be the only here, I'll be the only there. Meanwhile, church service I was  never missing. Mama made me take notes to see if I was listening, but I lived  among the Mexicans, so I never did the Crip thing. Instead, they gave me cans  to write my name upon the bricks thing. All the while, God was training me to  hear His voice, because only he knew that I would soon make a choice. I was  this tagger slash rapper son of a Black Panther, and it got high hopes for him.  He gonna be a pastor. So Should he run with the church boys, the backpackers  of thugs, and it's funny, it seemed like the Lord's answer was all of the above. I  like to say that I was slow cooked in that I would say it started in sixth grade,  and then culminated my junior year, examining just my experience in life and  just always again, feeling like I don't belong, whether I was born the wrong color  in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong decade to the wrong parents, like all  this, like I'm just Not an alpha male. It was an artist like I was. I would draw all  the time. I wrote poetry. Come on now I'm saying so. I think there was a moment when my father finally pointed to a particular passage, Psalms 139, before you  were in the womb, I knew you. He said you are fearfully and wonderfully made  marvelous. Are your works and that my soul knows well. And I think that it was  there that I realized that my value is not determined by some particular innate  quality that I have no your value is because God was willing to pay the cost of  His Son for you. That's the price he was willing to pay for you. But it cost me,  personally, nothing that all this was on purpose. Everything you are, your whole  goulash of experiences and gifts, all the scars, every hurt, every failure being 

spit on, walking home like all this, it's on purpose. You are fearfully and  wonderfully made. You're exactly what I want you to be. You was looking at a  last born, rightful heir to the throne, son of a nobody with poverty in my bones.  And that's beautiful. See, we ain't never had nothing, but nothing was sufficient.  It kept my belly full of the stuff the rich was missing, and that's beautiful. My  mama used to say, Don't nothing God do go to waste. And I'm seeing that  happen in my life. When I started rapping full time and doing poetry full time,  being so comfortable, you know, among Mexicans, being able to identify with  their struggle. I know what it means, like I get it, you know, I'm saying like I  speak the language, I know the slang, I know the pitfalls, like I know all that I  feel like my run has been a proclamation of that truth, but like my block didn't  make me the Creator did it. So in honor of of Jimi Hendrix, I string my life  instrument backwards and choose to play the back because in the word last is  first, and that's beautiful, like the pain and every scar you got. I prefer to call  them life tattoos. They're masterpieces. They're beautiful in the most intimate  and personable way. To say this, Christ has he's given me personhood. My  name is Jason Petty, aka Propaganda, and I am Second.