this is my america, by kim johnson
fiction, young adult / teen audiences / 5 stars

this book is..........it's fucking amazing in a way that will absolutely hurt you and you won't be okay, and not just because of the feels you will have for the protagonist, seventeen-year-old tracy beaumont who is trying to get innocence x (a fictional organisation) to look into her father's case and get him off death row, and her entire family and how mass incarceration actually affects families, but also because you will feel ashamed and the book will be hard to read and it needs to be hard to read but it also needs to be read.

you all know i'm not american and so idk, maybe i'm not the one who should speak to this? but well here we are, i've been doing the best i can to educate myself and listen despite not being able to get even tangentially involved in anti-racism in the way it needs involvement in the usa, though i've done work here in croatia that deals with different racist/xenophobic problems though at the core it's almost the same. anyhow.

tracy's dad is on death row for a crime he didn't commit. she's spent years and years trying to use her voice to help him. and then a white girl from her school gets murdered and her brother is the prime suspect. which, considering their family history, fucking sucks but that's the world we live in.

the story rings true on so many levels (at least from the resources i've spent time on studying before i read this book during the past couple of years and the ever increasing police brutality we've all been witness to), the deep emotions kim johnson portrays about how it feels to be black and a police target even when you haven't done anything wrong, the fear and anxiety and knowing how to act to deescalate situations that shouldn't have been escalated in the first place by trained men who act like...well. you're seeing the quote from the book i put in as the prefix tag of this blog post.

an ak-47 in a white hand has more rights than a black kid with skittles

and more so, this book is not just about tracy's dad and her brother and how she's trying to help them. it grows and expands beyond that into just what it feels like to exist in a world that hates you. i, of course, can't speak to that, wouldn't ever presume, and the book is not written for me, a white woman, to experience black pain and trauma and "get it" because i will never be able to, but beyond that - the parts of the book i loved the most were the ones where you could feel the love between tracy and the members of her family. it seeped through the pages and the words and every action tracy took to help them, to protect them in any way she knows and that was just so damn beautiful. tracy's voice is the one that propels this book forward, her strength and need to fight the unjust and racist system and it's ultimately hopeful. it's small hope, it's fragile, we all know it's easily destroyable but...it exists.