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).