Scenes from My Life: A Memoir

by Michael K. Williams

When white people predominantly lived there, the projects were just an arm of the community. But across cities in America, as the Blacks moved in, everyone else cleared out. And when the color of the projects changed, so did the association. The people were no different—still just working folks trying to get by—but “projects” would come to mean separate, problematic. Other. The projects were limbs chopped off by mainstream society. So we’d end up having to create our own.

Coming from the projects I cannot agree more. This is a least spoken abt reality regarding the pjs. So happy to see this highlighted in the book.

Any of my assertiveness was seen as disobedience, disrespect, a threat to her authority. For a long time, it confused me about speaking up for myself. In my home, that was treated as wrong, and I internalized

but my mother got a second opinion—from the church—and threw those pills out.

Montrose, my father, and I were all drilled with those lessons about Black masculinity and toughness, about wearing a mask to hide our vulnerabilities.