"The war on drugs is ethnic cleansing." A near-perfect of-the-moment memoir, the author opens her rich personal family scars of poverty and incarceration - heart-wrenching and balanced with her memories of constructing love and belonging in family, the ones you're born into and the ones you intentionally create - to clear analysis of the systemic ways that black lives and black family security is devalued in America especially in her LA childhood of the 80s and 90s. A solid personal companion for Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Community self-determination is probably the clearest demand she articulates, beyond simple compassion for the humans our system actively destroys from childhood.