Americans Who Can't Enjoy Full Rights Deemed 'Conditional Citizens' In New Book
In her first non-fiction work, Laila Lalami says these Americans want the country to succeed, but can't avoid the gulf between purported values of equality and the realities of systematic oppression.
An authoritative history of post 9/11 America has not yet been written. We may be too close to the events of that day — and the weeks and years after — to see it clearly.
But that is, in part, the assignment celebrated novelist Laila Lalami gives herself in Conditional Citizens, a no-holds-barred non-fiction debut.
Lalami recalls the sentiment of President George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks:. She sets out to expose the false simplicity of that idea. "My life resisted the kind of easy categories that the head of state had outlined for everyone," she writes.
