This Is My America

The characters in This Is My America illustrate how prejudice, bias, and racism are embedded in American society and are linked to generational cycles. The novel uses families like the Beaumonts and Ridges, Black families living through the harmful effects of police brutality, racism, and incarceration, and the Evanses, a white family with ties to the Ku Klux Klan to illustrate how these cycles continue to harm communities of color disproportionately.

Jamal represents how harmful and oppressive systems disproportionately place blame on Black people. Despite his prolific success as a track star and his promising future at Baylor University, society quickly casts Jamal as a murderer and a thug when Angela is murdered. For much of the narrative, Jamal must live in hiding for fear that he will be thrown into the same carceral system that was built to re-enslave freed Black people generations ago. When Tracy and Jamal are reunited, Jamal gives an impassioned speech that lays out his reasons for not going to the police in the aftermath of Angela’s murder: “The laws might change, the system might look different [...] Four hundred years, and we still ain’t American to them” (297-298). Jamal’s reticence to turn himself over to a system he knows was not designed to protect him represents the ancestral trauma that the descendants of enslaved people carry with them in America.

With this generational trauma comes generational strength. In times of strife or hardship, Tracy often calls on the strength of her ancestors. When Innocence X takes on the case, Tracy’s response is to feel “My ancestors’ strength pouring into me, fully armored so I can fight to prove their innocence” (197). Tracy understands that the cycle exists, but that individuals working together possess the power to disrupt this cycle. At the community meeting, she appeals to her community that racist beliefs convicted her father and that “Now that generational curse is passing down to my brother. The son…the son of a ‘killer’ must be a killer” (309). She goes on to say this cycle can be broken and the community has the power to stop it.

The cycle of racism also affects the Ridges family, and they represent the innumerable families whose lives have been torn apart by police brutality. Police murdered Jackson Ridges, the patriarch of the family, when he resisted the false charges made against him. In response to this, his daughter Beverly becomes a cop to try to change the system from within. Although she struggles throughout the novel with her commitment to her family and her commitment to her job to protect and serve, Beverly proves herself when she is shot. Though the book is largely critical of the criminal justice system and the police as an institution, Beverly represents a small beacon of hope that suggests the system may not be entirely broken or irreparable.

The Black families in this text fight against unjust systems that incarcerate and kill their family members. The Evanses, a white family, prove that those with the societal power and influence to create change perpetuate this cycle of racism over generations. Dean represents this when he confesses his worry about the effects of his mother’s beliefs: “What if I’m as bad as her? [...] That everything she’s raised me around is so ingrained in me I won’t even know, and then I do something to mess us up?” (216). Dean goes on to reveal that he has ingrained racial biases when he says that he initially believed Jamal was guilty. Dean’s admission harms Tracy and his bias has real consequences for their friendship. This illustrates how ingrained beliefs can have a harmful impact even when intentions are good.

Of the white characters, Mrs. Evans proves just how dangerous the cycle of generational racism can be. Mrs. Evans learned her racist beliefs from the community, including her father, who was a Grand Wizard in the Galveston County chapter of the KKK. Although a part of her understood that the lynching of Vietnamese man Minh Nguyen was wrong, when it came to speaking out against Richard Brighton for the murders of Mark and Cathy Davidson, she centered her own safety and well-being. Her internalized bias and racism convinced her that James Beaumont and Jackson Ridges were guilty even though she knew the truth: “Things were settled. James had a trial. They found him guilty [...] My God. What did I do?” (369). During her confession, Mrs. Evans realizes the gravity of her inaction, and its consequences on the lives of two families. Tracy puts this realization into focus: “My father didn’t do anything wrong, and Jackson Ridges paid with his life” (370). Mrs. Evans’s passivity, linked to the racist beliefs she inherited from her father and a willingness to trust in a corrupt criminal justice system, wreaked immeasurable havoc and pain on the lives of those in her community.