My mother’s words ricocheted alongside those of the raging man from the train. Things happen for a reason. As a journalist, I needed to understand the innate, universal emotion of desperately wanting to belong and to feel free. As an individual, who was once a child forgotten by her own self until the memories of that ghost resurfaced, I had to know how York was able to amass power from so many parents, including mine. Were my parents honestly looking for Islam and naively fell into York’s sweet-sounding narrative that, through separatism and the religion he taught, Black self-empowerment was
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