After reading the “My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children” by Hilton Als, I resonated with some of the key points of the document. The article was a series of open ended questions that brought out the inner voice of Als. From dying screaming to forgiving to protecting one’s family and one’s self were all put in to question. Als’ experience growing up both black and queer were either challenging or confusing at times. His personal anecdote is filled with moments of both.

Hilton Als starts his open letter with as a 7 year old living in a house with his mother, four older sisters, little brother and a revolving door of other relatives that ranged from his grandmother, aunt and two other cousins. He started painting a picture of discussing the reality of many black people of the time – they were refugees in a country not known as theirs. Al stated, “… 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.” Black people were (and to some extent now) treated as second class citizens. In a land that claims to have all of these liberties for ALL, BIPOC (and really all POC) have been left out of that equation. People are forced to confine themselves to the norms or essentially fight a system that is filled with landmines. Als sums this up by saying, “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.” Those who stepped up in the field had a chance of joining the already populated killing field present in society. The system is inherited, all of the prejudices are present at birth. One’s life is based on how they overcome the system and of the few who do overcome it, they struggle with being seen as an actual individual. Their identity is defined by the groups they are apart of in the realm of white society.

Hilton Als discusses his time growing up and figuring out what kind of person, and most importantly, what kind of man he wants to become. This is seen through a riot that occurred when he was 7. Als stated, “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 reflected the kind of society black women lived in. In a patriarchal society, women would remain silent in order to protect themselves from a further onslaught. Women were viewed as inferior to men during this time and if they challenged this system, they would become targeted. A mother wants nothing more for her children to become more but in a society with a killing field, surviving becomes the most forefront thought. Als speaks on this notion and speaks on the nature of having to unlearn this silence. With discussions of dying screaming. Being a man was not about being silent but being defiant. Als spoke on taking the path of forgiveness or the path of destruction, which spoke to him more. Due to his mother’s nature, he chose forgiveness but listed off just how troubling that was. So much was put on his soul when doing so.