This week we talk with writer and poet Miguel Machado about his compelling and vulnerable essay, "The Day My Mother Yelled Don’t Shoot," in which he recounts his startling interaction with police in front of his mother’s Long Island home one morning. Confronted by cops and held at gunpoint after being locked out of the house, Machado describes a bone-chilling experience he says is all too familiar for Black and brown men – and their mothers.

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