Throughout the article, there were many quotes that make me as a reader to stop and think about the situations being described. “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.” With the inclusion of this quote, Al portrays the target placed on the backs of black men, to either be killed or imprisoned. They are growing in a neighborhood majorly raised by mothers and this just influences the way they are raised. His mother wants them to keep a low profile so that they are rarely noticed.

“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.”The quote just supports the limitations that they had. They only had the option to either fight back and get killed or be passive and live to see another day and his mother was well aware of that. This just adds to the overall article theme that silence keeps them alive, but also doesn’t help change what’s going on around them. In a way, it‘s a double-edged sword.

The quote that stood out the most to me was “In those years, black boys were locked up or killed all the time; you didn’t think about it much, because to think about it was to remember what a killing field New York was, and how easily you, too, could become a body in that field.“This quote just relates to the current time we are living in. Not only in New York but across the nation there are black men and women getting killed without any reports, as well as being imprisoned on a regular. At this point, it seems more or less like a culture normalized. The fact that barely anything has changed since then shows that the method of combating the culture wasn’t effective, which relates to the part of the article “We ain’t got to prove we can die,We got to prove we can kill“.