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Summary
Summary
"Amid the ugly realities of contemporary America, American Hate affirms our courage and inspiration, opening a roadmap to reconciliation by means of the victims' own words."
--NPR Books
"The collection offers possible solutions for how people, on their own or working with others, can confront hate."
-- San Francisco Chronicle
An NPR Best Book of 2018
A San Francisco Chronicle Books Pick
One of Bitch Media 's "13 Books Feminists Should Read in August"
One of Paste Magazine 's "The 10 Best Books of August 2018"
A moving and timely collection of testimonials from people impacted by hate before and after the 2016 presidential election
In American Hate: Survivors Speak Out, Arjun Singh Sethi, a community activist and civil rights lawyer, chronicles the stories of individuals affected by hate. In a series of powerful, unfiltered testimonials, survivors tell their stories in their own words and describe how the bigoted rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration have intensified bullying, discrimination, and even violence toward them and their communities.
We hear from the family of Khalid Jabara, who was murdered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in August 2016 by a man who had previously harassed and threatened them because they were Arab American. Sethi brings us the story of Jeanette Vizguerra, an undocumented mother of four who took sanctuary in a Denver church in February 2017 because she feared deportation under Trump's cruel immigration enforcement regime. Sethi interviews Taylor Dumpson, a young black woman who was elected student body president at American University only to find nooses hanging across campus on her first day in office. We hear from many more people impacted by the Trump administration, including Native, black, Arab, Latinx, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, undocumented, refugee, transgender, queer, and people with disabilities.
A necessary book for these times, American Hate explores this tragic moment in U.S. history by empowering survivors whose voices white supremacists and right-wing populist movements have tried to silence. It also provides ideas and practices for resistance that all of us can take to combat hate both now and in the future.
Author Notes
Arjun Singh Sethi is a community activist, civil rights lawyer, writer, and law professor based in Washington, DC. He works closely with Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Sikh communities and advocates for racial justice, equity, and social change at both the local and the national levels. His writing has appeared in CNN Opinion, The Guardian, Politico magazine, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and he is featured regularly on national radio and television. He holds faculty appointments at Georgetown University Law Center and Vanderbilt University Law School, and presently co-chairs the American Bar Association's National Committee on Homeland Security, Terrorism, and Treatment of Enemy Combatants.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Human rights lawyer Sethi brings together 13 stories of "people whose lives have been impacted by hate" during and after the American presidential election of 2016 in this affecting anthology. Avid followers of the news are likely to be familiar with some of these cases, such as that of Taylor Dumpson, an African-American university student whose election as student government president was met with displays of nooses and bananas, and of Tanya Gersh, a Jewish businesswoman whose contact information was published by neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, spurring a storm of harassment and threats, and rumors of an armed march against the presence of Jews in her town. Other testimonies include those of black teenagers Destinee Mangum and Walia Mohamed, who survived a white supremacist's deadly attack on a commuter train, and Native American attorney Ruth Hopkins, who participated in the oil pipeline resistance movement on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation and experienced firsthand the violence with which law enforcement treated unarmed protestors. This book makes for troublesome reading, as many of the subjects report that their situations have become more difficult in the past two years-like Syrian refugee Asmaa Albukaie, who found a welcoming community in Idaho in 2014, but now fears for her and her children's safety because "this country is changing" under Trump-but Sethi ends on a tentatively optimistic note about finding ways to resist hate. This angry yet hopeful work is an important document of what the United States looks like to "the most vulnerable" among its people in 2018. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Firsthand reports on hate crime and its victims in the age of Trump.Why does the sitting president not use his bully pulpit to denounce anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and so forth? Because, insists civil rights lawyer and commentator Sethi (Georgetown Univ. Law Center), "he is a racist and a sexist, and his ideologies are white supremacy and greed." Even if you don't share that sentiment, it's hard to dismiss Sethi's belief that hate crimemotivated by the wish to do harm to people who are somehow different from the mainstreamis markedly on the rise. However, that belief often lacks hard evidence to back it. Although the FBI collects data on the incidence of hate crime, "their figures are grossly incomplete," in part because reporting from local police agencies is voluntary and one person's hate crime may be another's exercise of First Amendment rights. Consequently, violations go underreported or unreported, which this collection of testimonials aims to redress by validating the reality of those crimes and the great harm they do. Student government activist Taylor Dumpson, for instance, writes of the racist threats and subsequent trauma that resulted from her having been elected student president as an African-American at American University. "We need to lean into discomfort," she writes, "because nothing happens when we're comfortable." A Christian Lebanese-American in Tulsa recounts a series of violent assaults on the part of a neighbor who assumed her family was Muslim and who received the equivalent of a slap on the hand for his misdeeds: "They sent him back home, next door to the family he terrorized." Many of the speakers in these pages locate hate crime in a pattern of fear at the loss of white privilege, about which Sethi sensibly notes, "these Americans have tounderstand that the projects of justice and equity are not assaults on their racial identity."A useful book for those aiming to combat latter-day bigotry, with its many targets and manifestations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The recent U.S. political climate has often neglected the voices of immigrants who are impacted by current changes to public policy. Community activist and civil rights lawyer Sethi highlights some of the stories of immigrant victims of hate-related crimes that have surfaced as the potential result of current rhetoric in transcribed interviews in which each survivor had authority over the final edited result. The collection presents the pain and struggle these individuals endure but also their resilience in the face of adversity. Many are being targeted because of their race or religion; Sethi argues in the introduction that the United States has a history of hate as a means of control, starting with the Native peoples being displaced by Europeans. Further, there's been an emphasis on the separation of races throughout history, from slavery to the more recent Japanese American internment camps during World War II. The idea of equality under the law and freedom from harm are questioned through the individual accounts, creating a great companion to Deepa Iyer's We Too Sing America. VERDICT Recommended for anyone interested in immigrant rights.-Gary Medina, El Camino Coll., Torrance, CA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction: American Hate | p. 1 |
1 Asmaa Albukaie | p. 15 |
2 Taylor Dumpson | p. 25 |
3 Haifa, Victoria, and Rami Jabara | p. 35 |
4 Jeanette Vizguerra | p. 53 |
5 Alexandra Brodsky | p. 63 |
6 Sarath Suong | p. 71 |
7 Mar wan Kreidie and Shahid Hashmi | p. 81 |
8 Tanya Gersh | p. 97 |
9 Harjit Kaur | p. 107 |
10 Destinee Mangum and Walia Mohamed | p. 115 |
11 Dominick Evans | p. 123 |
12 Khalid Abu Dawas | p. 131 |
13 Ruth Hopkins | p. 141 |
Conclusion: Hope in a Time of Despair | p. 151 |
Acknowledgments | p. 177 |
Notes | p. 181 |