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Survival math : notes on an all-American family

Jackson, Mitchell S.2019
Books
With a poet's gifted ear, a novelist's sense of narrative, and a journalist's unsentimental eye, Mitchell S. Jackson candidly explores his tumultuous youth in the other America. Survival Math takes its name from the calculations Mitchell and his family made to keep safe - to stay alive - in their community, a small black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon blighted by drugs, violence, poverty, and governmental neglect. 'Survival Math' is both a personal reckoning and a vital addition to the national conversation about race. Mitchell explores the Portland of his childhood, tracing the ways in which his family managed their lives in and around drugs, prostitution, gangs, and imprisonment as members of a tiny black population in one of the country's whitest cities.
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