Conditional Citizens by Laila Lalami : A book review

Race, immigration, stories about the people of color and immigrants have been brimming my reading list for the past few months. Is it because the current state the country prompts more writers to write about these subjects, consequently these books make frequent appearances on the reading radar of the public? Or is it because as a person color I am drawn more and more towards these subjects to understand the present state of affairs? 

Or is it because it is my current special interest topic? Hurtling down the rabbit holes of some peculiar topic which is of no interest to anyone else comes to me naturally. I have devoured pages on reincarnation and biology and diligently followed Dr. Ian Stevenson, consuming every bit of his research and documentation on life after life. Before Netflix started making a killing out of true crime, there was a period when I was reading up everything I could find on serial killers and social deviants. Maybe race, racism, immigrants and life stories of people of color might be my new interest. Will have to see how long will this phase last.

While on the topics of race and immigrants in the US, I recently finished reading Laila Lalami's Conditional Citizens. Lalami was born in Morocco, educated in Rabat and London before finally earning her PhD from University of Southern California, Los Angles in Linguistics. She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and she currently teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. 

Conditional Citizens is a collection of essays on the subject of American identity and citizenship from a non-white immigrant's perspective. Lalami's definition of conditional citizens (in America mostly) goes like this, they are,

• people whose rights the state finds expendable in the pursuit of white supremacy 
• policed and punished more harshly than others by the state 
• not guaranteed the same electoral representation as others
• more likely to be expatriated or de-naturalized. 
  
• living in a terrible reality that their relationship to the state is at least partly determined by the color of their skin, nature of their creed, their gender identity or their national origin. 

She gives plenty of examples from history and contemporary scenes played out in the US of A as to how a constitution written by white men for white men has been instrumental in trampling the rights of all the conditional citizens of this country in its pursuit for white supremacy. If you are interested some of the examples she gives that can be explored further through Wikipedia are - Slave Bible published in 1807 (a special edition of Bible printed for use by plantation owners to preach to their slaves omitted mention of Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt as well as other references to freedom), Bhagat Singh Tind, Expatriation Act of 1907, Richard Nixon's war on drugs launched in 1971 and escalated by successive administrations, United States creating the largest prison industrial complex in the world and other such supporting evidence.

NOTE: Direct quotes from Lalami's book are in italics

Lalami gives a great explanation of the term white privilege - "White privilege doesn’t mean that white people have easy lives – it simply means that whiteness does not make their lives harder. Blackness by contrast has a statistically measurable and negative effect on the outcome of individual efforts in employment, housing and education."

She also dissects the so-called assimilation required of the (non-white) immigrants - "after a period of time, which usually lasted several decades, each group of immigrants was judged to have successfully integrated into the mainstream and become hyphenated: Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans or Chinese-Americans. Because assimilation revolves around power, however, descendants of white immigrants typically skip the hyphenation and are simply referred to as Americans.

.....the settlers didn’t assimilate to indigenous tribes, learn their languages, and adapt to their cultural customs. It was the Natives who assimilated, coercively and violently into the settler’s culture. The same government that wanted to conform indigenous people to white society worked hard t ensure that enslaved people could not be assimilated. In southern states, a slew of laws made it illegal for whites to teach slaves or freedmen how to read."

There are also other essays in the book that touches on topics like Barack Obama, Christine Blasey Ford and the Opioid Epidemic. Some relevant passages are below.

ON OBAMA : Many white people saw in him only figments of their imagination. White liberals treated him like another MLK., a savior who would deliver the nation from any and all ills. Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster is perhaps the purest expression of this view. White conservatives, meanwhile, though of him as a young Malcolm X, a radical who would never compromise on anything. Neither perspective quite captured the fact that Obama was first and foremost a skilled politician, successful at the art of the possible.

 ON CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD : When a woman, a citizen of the republic raises her voice against a man who is being considered for a position as chief interpreter of the laws of the republic, she is met by senators who tell her she must be mistaken. A man’s story is seen as inherently more authentic than a woman’s story. It is disbelief that under-girds the question: Why didn’t she report him sooner? 

....this is a very old trope about the value about the value of a woman’s word and it can be traced back to foundational texts. Under Athenian law women could not be litigants, and if they had cases to put forward they were to be represented by Men. Jewish law mandates that only men can serve as witnesses in court. Although women were among the earliest followers of Jesus, the apostle Paul counseled that women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission. And the Qur’an advises that in case of legal conflict, two men should be brought as witnesses, but if there are not two men available then a man and two women from those whom you accept as witnesses so that if one of the women errs, then the other can remind her.

ON THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC IN AMERICA : The opioid epidemic in today’s rural white communities is being treated very differently from the crack epidemic in urban black communities in the 1980s. Back then the state’s response was to expand the police presence and to pass draconian criminal legislation like three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing. An entire generation of black men and women was sent to prison for substance abuse. Nowadays, though, the government’s approach to opioid addiction is to treat it as a public health issue, with state politicians asking federal funding for drug treatment and counseling. This is a good development – drug addition should be treated as a disease, but the different response only serves as evidence that despite the fact Donald Trump disturbed the silence on whiteness, white Americans can still largely escape the disadvantages of race.

 

 

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Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings : A book review

I picked up poet Cathy Park Hong's collection of essays, Minor Feelings to see if I can find any overlap between her life and experience as an Asian American immigrant and mine. We did have the same hyphenated American racial identity, although I personally had never considered myself Asian. Asian for me means the people from East Asia - China, Koreas, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the like. But however I see it, I also understand the common the thread that binds us all - we all have roots in the continent of Asia, whether East Asia or West Asia and we are all outsiders, immigrants hot off the U.S immigration grill in most cases.

Park Hong, a Korean American born and brought up in California, touches this aspect of immigration history in one of her first essays. She reminds us that the immigration policies of the U.S government ever since the first immigration law was enacted in 1790 - The Naturalization Act, was intent on preventing non-white immigration. The 1790 law allows any free white person of “good character,” who has been living in the United States for two years or longer to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents are denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in court. This exclusion is especially concerning because 1 in 5 persons counted by the 1790 census was of African descent.

In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which bars Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. This is the first time a specific group of immigrants are targeted by a U.S immigration law. In 1917 U.S. government decides to be impartial and expands the ban to all of Asia - restricting the entry of Filipinos even, a former colony. Then there is the much-maligned and rightly so, Japanese Americans internment camps during the Second World War. In 1965 under the threat of heightening Cold War, as a part of the PR exercise to revamp its image US opens doors to the degraded Asian people - but only the best and select professionals who already have advanced degrees and were highly trained- engineers and doctors were admitted in. Hong's book made me look this all up as her essays filled the gaps.

She also reflects on the sorry space taken up Asians in daily life. She ruminates thus about her own poetry reading, " I confront the infinite chasm between audience conception of the Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look that part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities."

She says when she hears the phrase, 'Asians are next in line to be white', she replaces 'be white' with 'disappear', and that Asians reputed to be accomplished and law-abiding will disappear into this country's amnesiac fog.

While most of her essays resonated with me there were a couple that flew over my head. There was one where she expounds on the merits of Richard Pryor's standup and her appreciation of it. I never really understood Richard Pryor, even with closed captions on. Appreciating Pryor, might be like learning to appreciate dark beer. I need to drink a lot of light, craft and fruity beers to get there. Although many African American comedians I like, like Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Wayans Brothers consider Pryor the father of African American comedy. Maybe it was because Pryor created that niche for African Americans in the standup scene, where none had existed before. He was the pioneer, the reason why others could walk the trail he cleared. While Richard Pryor made Cathy Park Hong question the kind of audience she should be/is writing for, no stand-up comedian (except perhaps George Carlin) has ever led me down the tunnels of retrospection or life-reviews.

The other essay I breezed and skipped through was the one about her college days, female friendship and art. There was nothing wrong with the essay, it was just not a subject I cared much about. It delved too much on relationships, emotions and people and too less on hard cold facts, logic and info snippets that I tend to enjoy. My bad.

Minor Feelings is a hybrid of memoir and criticism. There were places where I could appreciate the poet in her, writing the essay, but there were also places where her prose dangerously veered into the stiff, incomprehensible parlance favored by academia. I could find similarities in her experiences and her diagnosis of situations that you are exposed solely by the merit of belonging to a racial minority.

In one of her essays, Park Hong mentions an anecdote about an award-winning poet of color say during a Q&A, "If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then, people will listen." Minor Feelings is Cathy Park Hong trying to come clean of her politeness cover, talking about race in prose, it was good to hear an Asian voice on the subject - loud and clear.

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