In ‘My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children,’ Hilton Als talks about the struggles of growing up black in America. He talks about the way the teachings of his mother and the events of his early years shaped his life.

Als talks about how his mother’s approach to dealing with what was going on around them was often that of silence. “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.” Reading this quote, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend this summer about the protests following the death of George Floyd. He was telling me that he really wanted to go and show his support, but he feared for his life. If things took a turn for the worst, would he make it out of there alive? Surely, he would be one of the first in the line of target. The choice was to fight for something he believed in and possibly lose his life, or to stay quiet, survive, but not be able to change the world we live in. Als repeatedly mentions that silence seems to be expected of black people. The only way to stay alive was to not call any attention to themselves.

Interestingly enough, later in the article, Als says, “the old model—Ma’s model—was not to give up too much of your power by letting your oppressor know how you felt. But, Ma, I was dying anyway, in all that silence.” This was interesting to me because it shows that although silence keeps you alive physically, there are parts of you that die when you aren’t speaking out about the things that you believe in. Throughout the article, Als talks about the key to survival was being silent, that not fighting back against all the wrong that was being done was the only way to make it out alive. His silence had not protected him from the world around him, instead made him more fearful. Silence just allowed things to keep going as they were and kept the world from changing, 

Als goes on to talk about the aftermath of the protests that he was not to ask questions about. He says, “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.” Here he talks about how the community that they had come together to build no longer had the feeling of belonging to them, perhaps it never did. The word “refugees” in this paragraph really stood out to me because of how ironic it seems. Refugees come to America to seek refuge from persecution in their country of origin for race, religion, nationality, etc. but here they were, being killed for simply being black.