" You wouldn’t want a son?”

“Too dangerous,” he said. “Black boys are target practice. At least black girls got a chance.”

“I don’t think that’s true.” “What’s not true? Why you think I enlisted? My pops told me, you better learn to shoot before these white men shoot you, and I did. I been all the way to Iraq and I could walk down the street here and get my head blown off. You don’t know what that’s like. "

― Brit Bennett , The Mothers