Melanie Mitchell

Zaid Shakir

Richelene Mitchell

Dear Self is the penetrating journal of Richelene Mitchell, a young African-American mother of seven struggling to raise her children while wrestling with the burden of poverty, callous public policy, and both overt and subtle manifestations of entrenched, institutionalized racism in America. Born in the rural South, the daughter of an African-American sharecropper, she would venture to the northern ghetto of Philadelphia to enhance her educational opportunities. A single mother of seven children living in a sprawling public housing project in New Britain, Connecticut, and forced to deal with the humiliation of public assistance, she chronicled a year of her life, 1973, in this penetrating journal. Written more than twenty years ago, her intimate experience with and intricate insights into the reality faced by an expanding American underclass are as relevant today as they were then. She sheds an informing and penetrating light on race relations, poverty, mothering, gender relations, and many other pertinent issues.

Richelene Mitchell

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