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My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children | The New Yorker

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Hilton Als on growing up in Brownsville with his mother: she longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.

Save this story Save this story By the late summer of 1967, when I turned seven, we’d been living in the house for six years. By “we,” I mean my mother, two of my four older sisters, and my little brother. And although we shared the place with a rotating cast of other relatives, including my mother’s mother and an aunt and her two children, I always considered it my mother’s home. The house was in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Like all the moves my mother engineered or helped to engineer for our family, this one was aspirational. Despite the fact that Brownsville had begun its slow decl

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