Review: A GOOD COUNTRY: Muslim Author Explores America’s Racist Past
American Pakistani Muslim author Sofia Ali-Khan’s memoir retells her experience as a minority living in twelve cities across the United States while digging into their often disturbing racial histories
At the forefront of ‘A Good Country,’ Ali-Khan opens with the presidency of Donald Trump and the path she feels he paved for openly expressed hate and intolerance. It was open season on Muslims and she recalls sitting in disbelief and fear for her family as the President of the United States declared people who look like her to be dangerous.
Her memoir ties in her own experiences with a historical look at the decades of atrocities white people committed against Black and Indigenous people and their ramifications on today’s society. She argues Muslims living in the U.S. today owe a debt to Indigenous people who were on this land long before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
The United States is often referred to as a ‘nation of immigrants’ however, Ali-Khan argues this can be problematic when recognizing the history of genocide and erasure Indigenous people face as well as enslaved African Americans.
In trying to discover herself as a young Brown woman in America, Ali-Khan runs into barriers that do not apply to her white counterparts which can be directly tied to the country’s history of racism.
As the child of immigrants herself, she often found herself straddling the line between living up to parental expectations and wanting to fit into American culture.
Ali-Khan was born in Florida but only lived there for a short time as the family moved multiple times for her father’s work. The quiet suburbs of Delaware is where she ended up spending most of her childhood as a minority among a majority white population.
This is where she begins her journey into American history, with the role of the local Quaker community. Historically seen as peaceful, nonviolent people, the reality of their interactions with Indigenous tribes is bleak. William Penn, leader of the Quakers, created treaties with the Lenape tribe promising they would be able to keep their land alongside European settlers. Instead, the white men ignored the Lenape’s established way of life which did not include concepts of owning land, and eventually forced the tribe out of the area, leaving them with nothing.
Being one of the only Brown families in her neighborhood, Ali-Khan began to wonder why there seemed to be concentrated areas of certain people living in one area. She discovered that after World War II white people became enraged by Black people trying to live in their neighborhood, which led local governments to pass laws prohibiting nonwhites from applying for housing in mostly white areas.
The neighborhood in which Ali-Khan attended elementary school, Levittown, was built by a man who made a career out of developing white-only housing.
“The segregationist attitudes on which Levittown had been premised still permeated its social life and institutions,” she writes before detailing how her third-grade teacher expressed intolerance and sat the only two children of color in the back of the class to be ignored the entire school year.
Ali-Khan rehashes going through puberty as a Muslim girl and her parents trying to find a mosque to attend while paralleling the history of slavery in New Jersey where the mosque is located.
It’s as she takes the reader through moments in her life that shaped her as a Brown Muslim woman in America, that Ali-Khan effortlessly weaves in moments in history that shaped America as a country.
As an adult, Ali-Khan moved from Florida to Arizona and Arkansas while attending college. In each state, she charts the complicated history of Indigenous people losing their lives and land, as well as Black and immigrant workers being denied resources.
She also sets out to find her own way in the world apart from her identity as a child of Pakistani immigrants. Ali-Khan often found herself in mostly white spaces and began to realize her need for community, representation and recognition as a Brown woman.
After graduating college, and law school, finding a career in activism as well as falling in love with the wrong person, she reconnects with her Muslim faith in a way that feels authentic to her own identity. Soon after she marries her husband Nadeem, settling in Chicago with their two children.
But it was the presidential election of 2016 that led to her calling quits on life in America. With the nation’s racist legacy reignited by the election of Trump, Ali-Khan and her family moved to Canada in pursuit of a less racialized culture.
“To escape our horrific history, America must acknowledge and remake its design as an embattled settler colonial state, for which the primary goal is to maintain power at the expense of its colonized peoples, as well as Black and immigrant workforce populations.”
While Ali-Khan and her family are enjoying the diverse culture Ontario has to offer, she does recognize that country has its own history of racism. However, she believes there is greater social and political impetus to address those issues.
'A Good Country' has an encapsulating narrative that flows between Ali-Khan's life and historical events. The deep dives into the nation's past are incredibly enriching and would be a great contribution to any high school classroom.
