As America undergoes a reckoning with the legacy of racism, the call for justice has rung for over 400 years. It’s a call that has stirred me since my first awakening as a young teen activist searching for ways to make progress on social justice. While writing
This Is My America, I was determined to pull back the layers that the Black Lives Matter movement elevated into American consciousness after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman. While the media focused on police brutality caught on tape, I wanted my novel to diagnose it as a symptom of a much larger problem by addressing the systemic issues that plague our criminal justice system. In addition, dispel the myth that acts of white supremacy are not just white cloaks in organizations of terror, but engrained in the DNA of our country — the untended roots of racism at our core. At my novel’s release, never did I imagine it would be during a time our country was in its rawest form of grappling with its history...