A Good Country
My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A leading advocate for social justice excavates the history of forced migration in the twelve American towns she’s called home, revealing how White supremacy has fundamentally shaped the nation.
“At a time when many would rather ban or bury the truth, Ali-Khan bravely faces it in this bracing and necessary book.”—Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies
Sofia Ali-Khan’s parents emigrated from Pakistan to America, believing it would be a good country. With a nerdy interest in American folk history and a devotion to the rule of law, Ali-Khan would pursue a career in social justice, serving some of America’s most vulnerable communities. By the time she had children of her own—having lived, worked, and worshipped in twelve different towns across the nation—Ali-Khan felt deeply American, maybe even a little extra American for having seen so much of the country.
But in the wake of 9/11, and on the cusp of the 2016 election, Ali-Khan’s dream of a good life felt under constant threat. As the vitriolic attacks on Islam and Muslims intensified, she wondered if the American dream had ever applied to families like her own, and if she had gravely misunderstood her home.
In A Good Country, Ali-Khan revisits the color lines in each of her twelve towns, unearthing the half-buried histories of forced migration that still shape every state, town, and reservation in America today. From the surprising origins of America’s Chinatowns, the expulsion of Maroon and Seminole people during the conquest of Florida, to Virginia’s stake in breeding humans for sale, Ali-Khan reveals how America’s settler colonial origins have defined the law and landscape to maintain a White America. She braids this historical exploration with her own story, providing an intimate perspective on the modern racialization of American Muslims and why she chose to leave the United States.
Equal parts memoir, history, and current events, A Good Country presents a vital portrait of our nation, its people, and the pathway to a better future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An American Muslim confronts the horrors of white supremacy in this poignant if overwrought memoir. Ali-Khan, a public interest lawyer and daughter of Pakistani immigrants, recaps histories of racist oppression in places she has lived: colonial slavery and contemporary housing segregation in Pennsylvania, where she grew up in the 1970s; the Seminole Wars against runaway slaves in Florida, where she went to college; violence during school desegregation in Little Rock, where she worked in the 1990s with a community organizing network; and the dispossession and massacre of Native Americans in Arizona, South Dakota, and elsewhere. Ali-Khan's explorations of these episodes are powerful and made deeply personal when she bears out the microaggressions she has weathered as an American Muslim, including people inquiring about her ethnicity and a gym teacher insisting that she run laps during Ramadan. Occasionally, though, the tallying of perceived threats—a Christian host thoughtlessly saying grace; Ali-Khan's panic when pro-Trump signs sprouted in her Pennsylvania suburb in 2016—dilutes the potency of her indictments (" historical and economic achievements are largely based on the violent extraction of labor from a racially defined slave or servant class, and on underpaid, marginalized immigrant workers"). Still, Ali-Khan's look at the way the past bleeds into the present makes for an affecting portrait of a nation yet to come to terms with its checkered history.