Conditional Citizens
On Belonging in America
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice • Finalist for the California Book Award • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, Los Angeles Times
In this brilliantly argued and deeply personal work, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S.citizen, using her own story as a starting point for an exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today, poignantly illustrating how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation. Weaving together her experiences with an examination of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture, Lalami illuminates how conditional citizens are all those whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this eloquent and troubling account, novelist and National Book Award finalist Lalami (The Other Americans) draws on her personal history as "an immigrant, a woman, an Arab, and a Muslim" to argue that becoming a U.S. citizen does not necessarily mean becoming "an equal member of the American family." Recalling that the first time a U.S. customs agent examined her American passport, he wanted to know how many camels her husband had to trade in for her, Lalami critically assesses political rhetoric from 9/11 through President Trump's border wall; skillfully unpacks charged words such as "allegiance" and "assimilation"; reflects on Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh through the lens of her own experience calling out workplace sexual harassment; and examines the erasure of Muslims from American history. "Conditional citizenship," she writes, "is characterized by the burden of having to educate white Americans about all the ways in which one is different from them." Lalami offers essential insights into how racism and sexism function in American society, and makes a persuasive case for preserving the "gray zones" between religious, ethnic, and national identities as a way to push back against tribalism and sectarianism. This profound inquiry into the American immigrant experience deserves to be widely read.
