Black people had to be more than victims and sources of problems. I sensed as much growing up, but discovering the ways in which racial segregation, beyond redlining and housing discrimination, affected the lives of black residents in Camden was redemptive. Learning how the malicious unseen, but felt, forces of economic disinvestment, political deception, and cultural pathologization shaped my hometown helped to magnify the love I have for the city’s people. It was proof that black families like mine had made a way despite the strategic forms of harm impacting their lives.
