A GOOD COUNTRY

A Pakistani American social justice lawyer exposes systemic racism in a variety of American towns in which she has tried to live and work harmoniously.

Ali-Khan grew up the child of Pakistani immigrants in the Delaware Valley area, and she has been educated and has worked across the U.S. In her first book, the attorney and activist describes the long, incremental process of disenchantment with the misleading American promise of freedom and equality for all. As part of one of the few Muslim families in her neighborhood and schools growing up, Ali-Khan felt keenly the sense of being “other.” Later in life, she learned that Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where her hometowns of Yardley and Fallsington are located, marked the early Quaker communities of William Penn, who owned slaves and was double-dealing with the Lenape people, whose land he purported to protect. In an overlong yet astute narrative, the author examines the innovative postwar housing development of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and its systematic “exclusion of Black Americans from home ownership”; the underlying wealth exploited from Black labor by the Ringling Brothers circus family in Sarasota, Florida, where the author went to college; the presence of the Jerome and Rohwer War Relocation Centers, “the last two concentration camps to be built in America during World War II,” outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, where the author worked after college; and the brutal racist legacy of former Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo. In her vivid chronicles of these and other locales, Ali-Khan shows how the ideal of America’s Colonial vision “requires the ongoing subjugation of Native people and the maintenance of an indebted Black and Brown working class.” Eventually, the struggles against this paradigm became too much for her and her growing family—exacerbated by anti-Muslim rhetoric after 9/11 and the rise of Trumpism—and they decamped to Ontario, Canada, where people have at least tried to grapple with the legacy of colonialism.

An effective demonstration of how nearly every area of the U.S. continues to be infected by racism and inequity.