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Obstruction of Childhood
Paperback
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.49
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What happens when a child disappears from school... but never disappears from the street?
In the late 1980s, the corners of Algiers Point, New Orleans became an unofficial classroom for a generation of Black boys. While schools recorded their absences, the streets became their daily reality. They were visible to neighbors, police officers, and the community-yet many drifted further from the institutions meant to protect them.
In Obstruction of Childhood, Mr. E combines personal experience, historical context, and institutional analysis to examine how childhood itself can be interrupted long before adulthood begins.
Growing up as one of the Over the Hump Boys, the author witnessed classmates disappear from classrooms and reappear on neighborhood corners, where missed opportunities gradually gave way to surveillance, arrests, and, for some, decades behind bars. This book challenges readers to look beyond individual choices and consider the systems that shaped those choices.
Inside, you'll explore:
- The forgotten story of the Over the Hump Boys of Algiers Point
- How school absence became normalized instead of addressed
- The impact of the crack epidemic on one New Orleans community
- The relationship between education, policing, and public policy
- The human cost of institutional failure
- Why childhood can be obstructed long before adulthood begins
Part memoir, part historical investigation, and part social commentary, Obstruction of Childhood asks a difficult question:
If an entire generation of children was visible in plain sight, why did so few people come looking for them?
This is not simply a story about one neighborhood.
It is a story about what happens when childhood is interrupted, institutions fall short, and a generation is left to learn life's hardest lessons on the corner instead of in the classroom.
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