There are two Americas, the novels tell me. There’s the land of the free, the land of hope and opportunity. And then there’s the land of fear, of moving through the world terrified – rightly so because stepping outside of your box puts you at risk.
At best, the threat is merely one of social judgment; at worst, you will end up dead at the hands of a police officer who will almost certainly escape punishment for it. To grow up black in the United States is to be under constant scrutiny and suspicion, to be penalised harshly for the crimes the white kids get a slap on the wrist for. There are two Americas: one sees the unfairness and the other doesn’t.
Reading the books in the days leading up to and shortly after the US presidential election feels like the writer’s maxim of “show don’t tell” writ large. I know that the country – the one where almost all the popular culture I love originates, the one that is still, to so many Irish people, a place that denotes “success” – is problematic, to say the least.
The devotion to guns and the highest incarceration rate in the world are among the more mystifying of Americans’ quirks (the misogyny and disdain for the poor being reasonably familiar), and make their racism (and their domestic violence) far more potent, and often lethal, than that of other developed countries. I know this, intellectually. But these books play it all out in technicolour glory and horror.
Wrenching
In her bestselling novel Dear Martin, Nic Stone shows readers that black kids get into trouble with the cops no matter how well behaved they are. Her follow-up, Dear Justyce (Simon & Schuster, £7.99), takes a wrenching look at what it's like when you're not so perfect, revisiting the character of Quan throughout his imprisonment as he awaits trial for a crime he didn't commit, although he has done much wrong in the past.
“I can’t really see where I could’ve just ‘made different choices’,” Quan writes in one of several letters he sends to his old pal Justyce, as we witness a childhood of poverty, violence and police brutality. For Quan, falling in with a gang means finding a family; his criminal activity seems understandable in a world that is so set against him. The unequal treatment of black and white detainees is noted; this is a scathing indictment of the (in)justice system.
For Quan, having people who support him makes all the difference, although Stone acknowledges that this is the most unlikely part of her narrative.
A black child in trouble is usually reduced to his skin colour, as we see in Punching the Air (HarperCollins, £7.99), when talented artist Amal is categorised as "angry" by the teacher appearing as his character witness. Like Quan, Amal is guilty of a far lesser crime than the one he has been accused of, but even the nice suit he wears to court won't make him "any less black".
This verse novel is a collaboration between bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and activist Yusef Salaam, one of the five boys once known as the Central Park Five, imprisoned for several years for a violent crime they did not commit (a process egged on by a moderately famous businessman named Donald Trump, who took out several full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty) and who have all since been exonerated.
At his sentencing, Salaam read a poem he wrote; some of what he wrote while incarcerated has made it into this fictional tale.
Horror
While this is emphatically not his own story, there are certainly elements of him in Amal, who despite the horror of it all believes that “if I write and draw and paint/ maybe I’ll get out of here alive”. This isn’t just teenage hyperbole; Amal is all too aware that “they/ can kill me in here/ and say I deserved it”.
He gets it; there are two Americas and Lady Justice offers him “jail or death”, whereas the white kid he was in a fight with has “the American Dream” handed to him. His friends are “thugs” and “hoodlums”; the white kids are “having fun”. They are “boys”. The black kids are “men”. Amal’s anger becomes the reader’s in this devastating account of the “school-to-prison pipeline”, in which zero-tolerance policies at school level, disproportionately impacting on minority students, pave the way for incarceration.
Comfortably upper middle-class Ashley Bennett doesn’t even want to think about this stuff and she doesn’t have to – her family are “the ‘good kind’ of black people . . . We smile and pose slightly off to the side in company photos, in the private-school brochures”. Her senior year is supposed to be fun – not shadowed by the riots after police are acquitted following the beating of Rodney King.
Christina Hammonds Reed's debut, The Black Kids (Simon & Schuster, £7.99), is a stunner of a novel that is both a love letter to and critique of LA, a city prone to forgetting its non-white roots. Ashley is exempt from some but not all of the treatment her male and poorer counterparts experience and what the riots teach her is that she is ultimately one of the "black kids" when things get tough.
Finally, even though it's a heart-warming, adorable rom-com on the outside, Leah Johnson's You Should See Me in a Crown (Scholastic, £7.99) echoes the concerns of its comrades when protagonist Liz reflects: "We can do everything right . . . but we never, ever win." Prom has always been political in this small town, but now the stakes are even higher as an outsider – queer, black, nerdy – shoots for the crown. A superb book.
