When Chanel thinks about the breakup of her own family, she sees eight children trying to survive—not only “the system,” as the public knows it, but the private rupture of a sacred bond. She sees the lines of her own sorrow in the faces of other mothers. “I see a lot of Black families like me.” It is her boys, Chanel says, who carry the deepest scars. A few months from now, in September 2020, a surveillance video will show a young man approaching a white Mercedes Benz on Staten Island’s North Shore. The assailant—his face obscured by a hoodie—will point a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol
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