In the text  “My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children”  by  Hilton Als, Als talks about his journey of being an African American in the late 1960s. To begin with, Als talks about his experience being locked down in the house while protesting was happening in his neighborhood (Brownsville). “Standing by my mother’s living-room window, I tried, tentatively, to ask her why our world was burning, burning. She gave me a forbidding look: Boy, be quiet so you can survive, her eyes seemed to say.” This quote demonstrates Als fear of the world he lives in. He didn’t want to be “another Richard Ross” ( a 14-year-old black boy killed by a cop in 1967).  In addition,  the quote “The world around us was not the one we had worked hard to achieve but the quiet, degraded world that our not-country said we deserved. We couldn’t keep nothing, the elders said, not even ourselves.” This shows the pain Als and his family had looked at the unworthy environment they were living in. This quote is significant because it shows that no matter how much was done to help the environment; Als and others in the black community were still going to end in the same sad place. Lastly, a quote that caught my attention was “for black people in Brooklyn, in America, not to forever be effectively refugees—stateless, homeless, without rights, confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died,” because it shows the bad conditions the black community was living in America. It demonstrates how Als’s mom saw the chance of the black community to live in a “good world” like an impossible thing to achieve