American Hate

August 1, 2018

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 28, 2018
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.