As I relate my experiences, and put the pieces together after all these years, the words of James Baldwin seem appropriate and clairvoyant in regard to the lives of my students and me: “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish… . You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”10 These dark families were “casualties of America’s war on the vulnerable.”11
