she didn’t want to be a parent anymore

“The summer before ninth grade my mom decided she didn’t want to be a parent anymore, even though I had two younger siblings that were six and four years old.”

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Burrowing deeper and deeper,

“I didn’t value their severity until her car pulled up to the gargantuan stone walls and expanded rolls of barbed wire. Again, I was confounded into silence. The long walk to the first of many doors I was about to go through felt like I was burrowing deeper and deeper,…

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My concept of racism

“My concept of racism was that it had ended years before and that in the 1980s it didn’t exist. Anger for the ignorance overwhelmed me.”

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Strangers beyond any further connection

We all live behind white picket fences, right? Or at least we think everyone else does. We all believe that everyone else lives a sheltered life and that ours is the only one screwed up, right? A few years ago, I went back to college to learn Spanish. One of…

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