The article “My Mother Dreams For Her Son and Her Children” by Hilton Als is about a boy who witnessed everything at a young age. An African American who has seen the different adversities. He witnessed the whole nine yards, deaths, and arrests. That affected the way he acted not only as he acted but as a person as well.“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 is such a powerful quote and demonstrates how you always have to watch what you say. It did not look well for him and his family as they were never respected by society because of their skin color. Another quote that goes hand in hand with the first quote is “Like any number of black boys in those neighborhoods, I grew up in a matrilineal society, where I had been taught the power—the necessity—of silence.” 

Another quote that stood out for me was “If Ma failed, then we failed, and she never wanted us to feel that. Something else Ma wanted: 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, all while trying to rear children who went to schools that taught them not about themselves but about what they didn’t have”.The amazing part about this quote was that the mother was a great character in which despite the adversities never seemed to take a toll on her. Shows a lot of selflessness and how she cares for people like her and the society she lives in.