This Is My America

This Is My America depicts a realistic portrayal of contemporary American society. The novel refuses to flinch away from the societal issues that plague it. The text is concerned with societal problems such as the legacy of racism and slavery in America, the prison-industrial complex, and police brutality. The novel exposes the connections between these systems and the legacy of white supremacy, which operates both on systemic and interpersonal levels.

In the Author’s Note, Johnson writes: “[America] had profited from slavery, and prisoners became a viable exception for use of free labor” (395), especially during the Reconstruction era in which Southern white people formed the hate group the Ku Klux Klan as a response to the end of slavery. In the text, this history is represented through the wrongful incarceration of Tracy’s father, who sits on death row for seven years due to the racist attitudes of a community who were willing to sentence an innocent Black man to death. Despite his alibi and police collecting faulty witness statements, James Beaumont was convicted and sentenced to death for a double homicide he did not commit. Johnson draws explicit connections between the legacy of slavery and the death penalty in the Author’s Note: “African Americans make up about 13 percent of the US population but are 42 percent of the people on death row” (397). The racist attack on the Beaumont family carried out by the KKK reveals the extent of racism’s hold on the setting of the text. James Beaumont’s conviction, and the police murder of Jackson Ridges, comes into clearer focus against the backdrop of continued Klan presence in their community.

It is important that the text is set in Texas, where the death penalty is still legal, there is a history of white supremacist actions and hate groups, and the for-profit prison system thrives. In a conversation with Steve Jones, Tracy learns more about the underlying causes for mass incarceration:

Building more prisons requires more prisoners, and Texas was the first state to adopt private prisons. Texas continues to have the highest incarceration rate in the United States in those private for-profit prisons. One prisoner can mean twenty thousand dollars a year. Bodies mean dollars. Over three billion dollars a year. Think. It’s big business. Innocence X threatens their profits (211).

The Beaumont family have experienced first-hand how this prison system operates and how willing it is to indict innocent men (specifically Black men). This knowledge encourages Jamal to go into hiding rather than turn himself over to the police. He says explicitly that he too would be a casualty of this system were he to turn himself in. Innocence X is used as a stand-in for real-world organizations such as the Innocence Project and the Equal Justice Initiative, which seek to interrupt racist systems that over-incarcerate Black men.

In This Is My America, a world is realized in which justice is achieved and wrongful convictions are overturned. The Beaumonts reunite at the end of the text, and the grip of white supremacy on their community confronted if not loosened. Despite this, the text is not naive to the lasting impacts that white supremacy and mass incarceration have on society. The Beaumont family will never get those seven years back, James Beaumont will have to readjust to living in “the same society, combating racial prejudice and inequality” (394), and Jackson Ridges remains dead at the hands of police. However, the message is clear that change is not impossible, advocacy works, and that individuals have a moral responsibility to use their power to enact real change, as in the case of Mrs. Evans finally coming clean with the confession that indicts white supremacist Richard Brighton. Prejudice, bias, and racism continue to exist within the world of This Is My America, but the text offers a glimpse of the change that can happen if a community is willing to acknowledge the existence of and reckon with these problems.