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A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America
A leading advocate for social justice excavates the history of forced migration in the twelve American towns she's called home, revealing how White supremacy has fundamentally shaped the nation.
"At a time when many would rather ban or bury the truth, Ali-Khan bravely faces it in this bracing and necessary book."-Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies
Sofia Ali-Khan's parents emigrated from Pakistan to America, believing it would be a good country. With a nerdy interest in American folk history and a devotion to the rule of law, Ali-Khan would pursue a career in social justice, serving some of America's most vulnerable communities. By the time she had children of her own-having lived, worked, and worshipped in twelve different towns across the nation-Ali-Khan felt deeply American, maybe even a little extra American for having seen so much of the country.
But in the wake of 9/11, and on the cusp of the 2016 election, Ali-Khan's dream of a good life felt under constant threat. As the vitriolic attacks on Islam and Muslims intensified, she wondered if the American dream had ever applied to families like her own, and if she had gravely misunderstood her home.
In A Good Country, Ali-Khan revisits the color lines in each of her twelve towns, unearthing the half-buried histories of forced migration that still shape every state, town, and reservation in America today. From the surprising origins of America's Chinatowns, the expulsion of Maroon and Seminole people during the conquest of Florida, to Virginia's stake in breeding humans for sale, Ali-Khan reveals how America's settler colonial origins have defined the law and landscape to maintain a White America. She braids this historical exploration with her own story, providing an intimate perspective on the modern racialization of American Muslims and why she chose to leave the United States.
Equal parts memoir, history, and current events, A Good Country presents a vital portrait of our nation, its people, and the pathway to a better future.
"At a time when many would rather ban or bury the truth, Ali-Khan bravely faces it in this bracing and necessary book."-Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies
Sofia Ali-Khan's parents emigrated from Pakistan to America, believing it would be a good country. With a nerdy interest in American folk history and a devotion to the rule of law, Ali-Khan would pursue a career in social justice, serving some of America's most vulnerable communities. By the time she had children of her own-having lived, worked, and worshipped in twelve different towns across the nation-Ali-Khan felt deeply American, maybe even a little extra American for having seen so much of the country.
But in the wake of 9/11, and on the cusp of the 2016 election, Ali-Khan's dream of a good life felt under constant threat. As the vitriolic attacks on Islam and Muslims intensified, she wondered if the American dream had ever applied to families like her own, and if she had gravely misunderstood her home.
In A Good Country, Ali-Khan revisits the color lines in each of her twelve towns, unearthing the half-buried histories of forced migration that still shape every state, town, and reservation in America today. From the surprising origins of America's Chinatowns, the expulsion of Maroon and Seminole people during the conquest of Florida, to Virginia's stake in breeding humans for sale, Ali-Khan reveals how America's settler colonial origins have defined the law and landscape to maintain a White America. She braids this historical exploration with her own story, providing an intimate perspective on the modern racialization of American Muslims and why she chose to leave the United States.
Equal parts memoir, history, and current events, A Good Country presents a vital portrait of our nation, its people, and the pathway to a better future.
Editorial Reviews
"Sofia Ali-Khan's A Good Country beautifully weaves together history and deeply personal narrative as it unwinds the classic immigrant belief in the ‘American Dream.' . . . Compelling, enjoyable, engaging, and so full of purpose and conviction."-R. Cielo Cruz, Southern racial justice activist, educator, and writer
"In this captivating portrait of America, Sofia Ali-Khan makes the case that a ‘good country,' as her immigrant parents would call their new home, should be strong enough to confront its past. At a time when many would rather ban or bury the truth, Ali-Khan bravely faces it in this bracing and necessary book."-Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies
"How can a book with such hard truths be so beautiful? Sofia Ali-Khan has woven the search for her identity and home with an exploration of racism and economic exploitation at the center of the American myth. This book should be in the curriculum for every high school senior."-Suzanne Pharr, co-founder of Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and author of Transformation: Toward a People's Democracy
"Readers of this powerful memoir will benefit from Ali-Khan's brave soul-searching, comprehensive research, and beautiful storytelling."-Priscilla Warner, New York Times bestselling author of The Faith Club
"A stunning and beautiful memoir of the author's experience as a Muslim woman in a post-9/11, post-Trump America. Interweaves the personal and the political . . . an enthralling illumination of how history persists to shape present-day relations."-Lisa Stampnitzky, PhD, lecturer in politics at the University of Sheffield and author of Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism"
"Both memoir and historical narrative, A Good Country is an American story about an American dream reserved for White people living on stolen land. . . . Sometimes the journey to fighting oppression means escaping from an inhospitable if not burning house. Sofia Ali-Khan has arrived at the right time."-David A. Love, JD, professor, journalist, and contributing author to...
"In this captivating portrait of America, Sofia Ali-Khan makes the case that a ‘good country,' as her immigrant parents would call their new home, should be strong enough to confront its past. At a time when many would rather ban or bury the truth, Ali-Khan bravely faces it in this bracing and necessary book."-Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies
"How can a book with such hard truths be so beautiful? Sofia Ali-Khan has woven the search for her identity and home with an exploration of racism and economic exploitation at the center of the American myth. This book should be in the curriculum for every high school senior."-Suzanne Pharr, co-founder of Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and author of Transformation: Toward a People's Democracy
"Readers of this powerful memoir will benefit from Ali-Khan's brave soul-searching, comprehensive research, and beautiful storytelling."-Priscilla Warner, New York Times bestselling author of The Faith Club
"A stunning and beautiful memoir of the author's experience as a Muslim woman in a post-9/11, post-Trump America. Interweaves the personal and the political . . . an enthralling illumination of how history persists to shape present-day relations."-Lisa Stampnitzky, PhD, lecturer in politics at the University of Sheffield and author of Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism"
"Both memoir and historical narrative, A Good Country is an American story about an American dream reserved for White people living on stolen land. . . . Sometimes the journey to fighting oppression means escaping from an inhospitable if not burning house. Sofia Ali-Khan has arrived at the right time."-David A. Love, JD, professor, journalist, and contributing author to...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Introduction: Extra American
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "Unguarded Gates" (1895)
On December 7, 2015, I sat on a rocker in my preschoolers' shared room, scrolling through the news while waiting for them to fall asleep, under a blanket to dim the light from my screen. Three days before, my husband, Nadeem, had left our house in Yardley, Pennsylvania, for business meetings in London. Five days before, there had been a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, during which fourteen people were killed and twenty-two were injured. The shooters were a married Muslim couple, thought to have been politically radicalized by overseas organizations. It was the deadliest mass shooting since Sandy Hook Elementary School. The nation reeled and American Muslims took cover. In the post-9/11 politics of our country, an act of violence by any Muslim was broadly attributed to us all, and to Islam itself. We were expected to, and many of us did, respond by publicly condemning the attacks, seeing no way to reject collective culpability and still convey our horror at what had happened. We had no way of saying "We are not them-we should not be held accountable for their actions." Over the preceding fourteen years, the social space to assert this basic principle of human rights had all but disappeared for American Muslims.
The most we could hope for was to reduce the inevitable collective punishment, to minimize retaliation against Muslims and every person who might be mistaken for Muslim in our communities. In the days that followed the attack, a pig's head was lobbed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque just north of Girard Street in Philadelphia. I knew that mosque; my friends were community leaders there. I'd helped cover the exterior of the old factory building in which it was housed with a gorgeous geographic mural. My part had been to carve the ninetynine names for God into ceramic tile that wrapped around the building just above eye level.
During the same period, a store owner in New York was beaten and hospitalized, a Somali restaurant torched in North Dakota, and several other mosques were vandalized or sent threatening messages. Employees at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee received death threats, several Muslim passengers were pulled off of flights, and Muslim organizations reported a broad escalation in threats and attacks across the country.
In suburban America, we opened our front doors more carefully, forgoing cultural or religious attire. More of us stopped going to the mosque. We kept our children home from school and said an extra prayer when we finally calmed our nerves enough to send them back. We kept our heads down at work and we volunteered at and donated to Muslim civil rights organizations, thinking that any day now it could be us at their doorstep. We tried to tighten the circles of our lives, make ourselves a little less exposed to the whims of the people around us. We still had to live, had to travel for and get along at work and school, had to shop and drive and be in public spaces. We pushed our worry aside and played with the kids. But we were terribly aware that in the American mind we had collapsed further into a monolith, each of us individually culpable for the misdeeds of any Muslim. There was little escape from our sense of precarity because we were all subject to the same limitation: We have no control over one another. Muslims don't have a pope, or even a regulated clergy. And we are an incredibly diverse group of people from various parts of the world, speaking a variety of languages, adhering in different degrees to diverse cultural practices. The one thing we have in common is a personal declaration of faith, and even that is absent for those who consider themselves culturally Muslim, or Muslim by ancestry.
Eleven months earlier, on February 10, 2015, three Muslim students were shot, execution-style, by a neighbor who knocked on the door of their Chapel Hill, North Carolina, apartment. The apartment was actually home to two of them, Yusor and Deah, a strikingly beautiful, recently married couple who had grown up in North Carolina. Deah, who was twenty-three, had begun dentistry school; Yusor, who was twenty-one, was about to enter the same program; and Razan, Yusor's nineteen-year-old sister, was studying architecture and environmental design. All three were deeply engaged in their families, their schools, and their community, outstanding students who spent their time off preparing meals for local homeless people and planning a dental relief trip abroad for Syrian re...
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "Unguarded Gates" (1895)
On December 7, 2015, I sat on a rocker in my preschoolers' shared room, scrolling through the news while waiting for them to fall asleep, under a blanket to dim the light from my screen. Three days before, my husband, Nadeem, had left our house in Yardley, Pennsylvania, for business meetings in London. Five days before, there had been a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, during which fourteen people were killed and twenty-two were injured. The shooters were a married Muslim couple, thought to have been politically radicalized by overseas organizations. It was the deadliest mass shooting since Sandy Hook Elementary School. The nation reeled and American Muslims took cover. In the post-9/11 politics of our country, an act of violence by any Muslim was broadly attributed to us all, and to Islam itself. We were expected to, and many of us did, respond by publicly condemning the attacks, seeing no way to reject collective culpability and still convey our horror at what had happened. We had no way of saying "We are not them-we should not be held accountable for their actions." Over the preceding fourteen years, the social space to assert this basic principle of human rights had all but disappeared for American Muslims.
The most we could hope for was to reduce the inevitable collective punishment, to minimize retaliation against Muslims and every person who might be mistaken for Muslim in our communities. In the days that followed the attack, a pig's head was lobbed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque just north of Girard Street in Philadelphia. I knew that mosque; my friends were community leaders there. I'd helped cover the exterior of the old factory building in which it was housed with a gorgeous geographic mural. My part had been to carve the ninetynine names for God into ceramic tile that wrapped around the building just above eye level.
During the same period, a store owner in New York was beaten and hospitalized, a Somali restaurant torched in North Dakota, and several other mosques were vandalized or sent threatening messages. Employees at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee received death threats, several Muslim passengers were pulled off of flights, and Muslim organizations reported a broad escalation in threats and attacks across the country.
In suburban America, we opened our front doors more carefully, forgoing cultural or religious attire. More of us stopped going to the mosque. We kept our children home from school and said an extra prayer when we finally calmed our nerves enough to send them back. We kept our heads down at work and we volunteered at and donated to Muslim civil rights organizations, thinking that any day now it could be us at their doorstep. We tried to tighten the circles of our lives, make ourselves a little less exposed to the whims of the people around us. We still had to live, had to travel for and get along at work and school, had to shop and drive and be in public spaces. We pushed our worry aside and played with the kids. But we were terribly aware that in the American mind we had collapsed further into a monolith, each of us individually culpable for the misdeeds of any Muslim. There was little escape from our sense of precarity because we were all subject to the same limitation: We have no control over one another. Muslims don't have a pope, or even a regulated clergy. And we are an incredibly diverse group of people from various parts of the world, speaking a variety of languages, adhering in different degrees to diverse cultural practices. The one thing we have in common is a personal declaration of faith, and even that is absent for those who consider themselves culturally Muslim, or Muslim by ancestry.
Eleven months earlier, on February 10, 2015, three Muslim students were shot, execution-style, by a neighbor who knocked on the door of their Chapel Hill, North Carolina, apartment. The apartment was actually home to two of them, Yusor and Deah, a strikingly beautiful, recently married couple who had grown up in North Carolina. Deah, who was twenty-three, had begun dentistry school; Yusor, who was twenty-one, was about to enter the same program; and Razan, Yusor's nineteen-year-old sister, was studying architecture and environmental design. All three were deeply engaged in their families, their schools, and their community, outstanding students who spent their time off preparing meals for local homeless people and planning a dental relief trip abroad for Syrian re...
