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What other important or personal experiences you drew from in order to make “Clear Blue Skies?”

Breeze Brewin: For those not from New York, Mount Vernon is 80% black. I was on the Southside one day and that’s where I experienced racism for one of the first times. I was riding my bike and some old white guy in the neighborhood saw me and yelled: “What are you doing here? Go back to Mount Vernon! Go back to Mount Vernon!” I was little and didn’t even know what he meant. I ran home and told my mom and she was like, ‘Who said that to you?’ She actually had me take her back to the area where it happened and find the guy [laughs] and was like, “You ever talk to my son like that again I’ll send you to Mount Vernon myself!” You gotta understand, where I grew up in the Bronx was very diverse, fifty percent black or Latino, and the other half-white. In my old birthday pictures we had white people, and Jewish cats, Jamaican neighbors, all of it and everybody it seemed. Then crack came and it wasn’t so diverse no more. White Flight was immediate and real and they left right away [laughs].