The podcast was really something that was very insightful but it was also very pessimistic. For many reasons, one of the most prominent ones being the fact that it just reaffirms how racism is very much still in existence and how that affects black people particularly women more than some may realize. Racism and oppression in America I honestly feel like is to blame for what happened to Mary. Her story goes to show how the systems in place in America fail people like her and not only do they fail but they traumatize them. She literally had so many obstacles to face that it was almost impossible to become a success story yet she still manages to do so through resilience. This is very admirable but it’s still very heartbreaking to hear how much she has had to go through. There were just so many levels of injustice happening in certain areas of her life that made it impossible for her to have a happy ending. When she was talking about her struggles with ADHD and how they used a certain other term to classify the disorder that she had because one was more damaging, difficult, and disproportionately linked to kids of color. Even when she had to choose whether to go back to her schizophrenic mom or to be put in foster care, it just showed how again and again the system would break her even when she was at her best with getting into Penn. That is a huge accomplishment in and of itself but she still needed more help and aid than she was granted. Our country and its institutions consistently have a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality when it comes to people of color. Which is extremely unrealistic and frankly degrading. She literally got set up to succeed and then fail again. It absolutely broke me to find out that she made it to her junior year in college because I can’t help to think that in just about one more year, her future could’ve been more different. She had all this trauma and what angers me is that she was not entitled to the innocence that many kids around the world have. So when she got into that car accident or anything that had happened, she didn’t have the grace and forgiveness that many teenagers and kids are given because of the color of her skin, if we’re being honest. She didn’t receive a slap on the wrist with law-enforcement and a lot of other things because of the systems in place in this country. From so many microscopic levels, the systems in place in this country are not just systems, they are the decisions that many Americans have to go make and live with in response to them. It’s the countless stories like Mary that you have to listen to and really process to understand how hurtful these Systems are. Thankfully she has an amazing story to tell in her music, to her family and her son. Thankfully, although she was failed by many, she never failed herself.