Conditional Citizens: On Belonging In America
by Laila Lalami
Buy on AmazonA New York Times Editors' Choice • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and protections. "Sharp, bracingly clear essays."—Entertainment Weekly 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.…
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"This is the first nonfiction book by Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-born novelist who writes searingly about outsiders. It comes at a fraught time for immigrants in America. Lalami movingly chronicles her own journey from optimistic, naturalized American to post-Sept. 11 “conditional citizen” repeatedly scrutinized as an immigrant, an Arab, a Muslim. In one scene, she describes a “white woman in a blue pantsuit” at one of her book readings pressing her on ISIS, as if “I was a specimen, culled from a group of people these readers found mysterious and perhaps dangerous.” Conditional citizens, Lalami writes, are those who cannot dissent without their patriotism being questioned, who cannot move freely, who are jailed without cause. Though the U.S. prides itself on being a country of immigrants, it has often treated new Americans with exclusion and mistrust."
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