May 2021

Favorites of the month: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, and Of Women and Salt

In American legal and cultural tradition, we tend to subscribe to the notion that our country’s residential racial disparities stem from de facto segregation – that is, segregation that has been privately implemented and enforced through practices such as redlining, blockbusting, and organized “white flight.” In 1992, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy affirmed this conception in Freeman v. Pitts as he dismissed America’s “vestiges of past segregation” as “a stubborn fact of history” – extant and unfortunate, but not under the court’s “legal responsibilities.” More recently in 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts reiterated Kennedy’s opinion, maintaining that racially segregated neighborhoods could not be provably traced to government action, thus rendering them devoid of any “constitutional implications.”    

In his book, The Color Law, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute disputes Kennedy’s and Roberts’s opinions, unearthing a provocative history of segregation rooted in the laws and policies of America’s federal, state, and local governments. Although private discrimination has played a role in preserving segregation, he writes, it was in fact de jure segregation – that is, segregation by way of governmental laws and policies – that more significantly encoded where African Americans “should” (and continue to) live. Rothstein begins his history with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, by which Congress prohibited any practice that safeguarded the “characteristics” of slavery, including racial discrimination in housing. Rejecting this interpretation, the Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that while Congress had the authority to “pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery,” discrimination in housing was not such a “badge or incident.”

From there, Rothstein excavates a fascinating history as to how American government coordinated to create and maintain separate living areas for blacks and whites. At the state and local level, he details how governments ordered African Americans to vacate homes purchased in white neighborhoods and strategically selected school locations, with the specific intention of populating segregated communities. At the federal level, the actions were often even more egregious: Up through the 1950s, Rothstein tells us, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration refused to insure mortgages for African Americans seeking to live in “designated white neighborhoods” as well as white individuals who resided in communities where African Americans were present.

Shamefully, there was so much in The Color of Law that was foreign to me. Like so many, I was taught a history of free-standing (and virtually passive) segregation, in which African Americans somehow “found themselves forced” into marginalized communities, without any clear explanation as to why or by whom. For that reason alone, I think The Color of Law should be required reading, though there was so much that I additionally enjoyed about the book. Rothstein is an academic by training, but his writing has a way of touching the soul. With discernment and intentionality, he encourages us to consider the ways in which our language may serve to shape, deepen, or even euphemize our understanding of racial segregation: How do the words we use to describe racial segregation (i.e., “inner city,” “bad neighborhood,” “ghetto,” etc.) potentially cloud our perceptions? How does our terminology de-problematize separation and mitigate our own culpability?

In his New York Times review of The Color of Law, NYU’s David Oshinsky was spot-on in his assessment that “one of the great strengths of Rothstein’s account is the sheer weight of evidence he marshals.” Backed by such exhaustive research, Rothstein indeed “demolishes” the theory that government played a secondary or “neutral” role in perpetuating segregation; in doing so, he transforms his book into less of an “account” and more of a rallying cry, which rises to the sky like a galvanic and ineluctable wave. Even so, there are times in The Color of Law when Rothstein becomes a bit too presumptive, favoring postulation (i.e., “must have been,” “as they surely were,” “we can reasonably assume,” etc.) over what he calls “courtroom standards of proof.” With this same pattern of presumption, Rothstein also struggles to be clear about what he means by “incentives for integration,” especially when framing proximity to “whiteness” as a blanket and even necessary prerequisite to American success. At one point, he writes that “youth growing up in predominantly African American communities, even middle-class ones, will gain no experience mastering a predominantly white professional culture in which they, as adults, will want to succeed.” Yet under this paradigm, desegregation starts to look less like integration and more like a problematic form of assimilation – a form of assimilation that idealizes and sustains the dominant culture while homogenizing, silencing, and suppressing those on the outside, especially those who don’t wish to conform.

These criticisms aside, The Color of Law is an invaluable resource for those seeking to better understand racial segregation’s layered, complicated, and tragically ongoing history. After reading it, one’s perception of the “American dream” will never quite be the same.

In 2010, Suleika Jaouad graduated summa cum laude from Princeton with a degree in Near Eastern Studies and aspirations of becoming a foreign war correspondent. She was brilliant and ambitious, her future at once attainable and yet infinitely far-reaching – like “a spool of ribbon unfurling far beyond what the mind’s eye could see.” Moving to Paris after graduation, she itched to join a creative and unfettered world, though beneath the surface of her skin she felt a very different kind of itch – an itch that prickled and crawled through her hypodermis, as if symphonized by a million tiny ants. With her itch came other symptoms – irrepressible fatigue, anemia, asthmatic breathing, endless colds – and, ultimately, a diagnosis: Acute myeloid leukemia, with a twenty-five percent chance of survival.  

To a then-twenty-two-year-old Suleika, her diagnosis represented “an irreparable fracture” – a “bifurcation” – which immutably ramified her fate, cleaving her identity into two separate and irreconcilable selves. With just three words, her once limitless future had become “shrouded in doom” – its landscape now a dark and foggy abyss, filled only with “terrifying unknowns.” Ever enterprising, Suleika endeavored to make the most of her misfortune, ignoring her reality as she started to read War and Peace, enrolled in a creative writing course, and took the GRE, with the hopes of applying to PhD programs. But with her body invariably punctured and depleted, she had barely enough energy to survive. Abandoning dreams reserved for inhabitants of the kingdom of the well, she vowed to herself that she would simply keep a journal, in which she’d write every day – even if just a single sentence or word.   

In her deeply moving memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, Suleika chronicles her battle against cancer, taking pieces from her journal, blog, and New York Times column (“Life Interrupted”) to deliver an unforgettable story of resilience, heartbreak, and survivorship. With extraordinary depth and self-perception, she recaptures the four years she spent chained to her hospital bed – a purgatorial “Bubble” marked by fluorescent lights, euphemistic Hallmark cards, and never-ending wires and tubes, all tethering her to the kingdom of the sick. As an inhabitant of this kingdom, Suleika writes, she slowly became less like a person and more like a specimen to be endlessly “probed, prodded, and whispered about.” Abandoned by her college friends, she was instead overwhelmed by “disaster tourists,” who’d arrive unannounced at her hospital room door, all armed with unhelpful platitudes and an “overzealous” urge to witness “the medical carnival that [her] life had become.” As these tourists inevitably lost interest, Suleika was forced to reckon with a painful but undeniable truth: That while porous and permeable, the division between the kingdom of the sick and the kingdom of the well is far from transcendent.

From there, Suleika writes how she and her friends from the oncology ward formed something of a “motley cancer crew.” With one another, she tells us, they found not only solidarity in their suffering, but also peace in their shared language – in their “breaking through the silence, the shame of it all, together.” Through her journal, blog, and column, Suleika was also able to unearth another type of solace, steeped in her penchant for raw and unhoneyed candor: “[The words] poured out of me,” she writes, “first cautiously, then exuberantly, my mind awakening as if from a long slumber.”

Reflecting on her last day of chemo, Suleika describes how all of her friends and family congratulated her on at last being “done.” But, for Suleika, the hardest part of her cancer treatment had only just begun. “When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable,” she tells us, “the obvious is gained. You have your life – you have your time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.” While cancer no longer resided in Suleika’s veins, it had endured in other ways, infiltrating her relationships, thoughts, and sense of self. In her singular and all-consuming effort not to die, she had forgotten how to live.

From this second “bifurcation,” Suleika recounts her reentry into the world – a cross-country road trip covering fifteen thousand miles and thirty-three states. From the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast and the American South, she set out to meet the people who wrote to her while she was sick. As grueling as her four years of battling cancer were, it was here, on this journey, where Suleika was forced to undergo the hardest part of her healing. In her book, she recaptures this in a way that is piercing and unforgettable. There are no bromides or epiphanies or silver linings; only a reckoning with the ghosts of the things, and the people, she has lost. “Though the word may suggest otherwise,” she writes,   

“Recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is newly being born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.” 

Out of this quest of “terrifying discovery” comes something of a masterpiece. In her book, Suleika confesses that her battle for survival will forever haunt her, its imprint serving as a daily and perennial reminder of how easily things could once again be lost. But her battle also gave her “a jeweler’s eye” – an ability to discern and cherish the precious bits; the bits the rest of us so regularly fail to notice.  

Between Two Kingdoms is itself proof that the most beautiful art is often only rendered through suffering and pain. Filled with love, life, and meaning, it reads like a new pair of glasses, affording a fresher perspective, a clearer view – a piece of Suleika’s miraculous eye.  

On first glance, Gabriela Garcia’s captivating first novel, Of Women and Salt, tells the story of the Latin American diaspora and its associated traumas of displacement. It centers on the lives of two mothers and two daughters: Carmen and Jeanette and Gloria and Ana. Born and raised in Miami, Jeanette is twenty-seven, though her battle with addiction has aged and hardened her. Her hovering but reticent mother, Carmen, is a member of the “First Wave” of Cuban immigrants – “the people who lost homes and businesses and riches and ran from communism at the start of the revolution.” Reflecting a far different narrative of dislocation, Jeanette’s neighbor, Gloria, is an immigrant from El Salvador; at the beginning of the book, she is seized and detained by ICE while her young daughter, Ana, is left behind, leaving Jeanette no other choice but to take her in.

With a past ravaged by trauma and abuse, Jeanette is hungry for something – for anything – to curb her dual appetites for anesthetization and fulfillment. She looks to her ancestral homeland, Cuba, with its “winding colonial streets” and “beautiful beaches,” as a potential refuge. To her, Miami exists as nothing more than a lesser facsimile of Old Habana – “a hollow receptacle of memory, a shadow city, full of people who needed a place to put their past into perspective.” Yet while virtually everyone Jeanette knows looks to Cuba with fondness and nostalgia, her mother, Carmen, anathematizes it. Of Carmen, Garcia writes,

“Cuba this, Cuba that. Cuba Cuba Cuba. Why anyone left a place only to reminisce, to carry its streets into every conversation, to see every moment through the eyes of some imagined loss, was beyond her.”

At the beginning of the book, the reader is left to assume that Carmen’s antipathy is political: “My mother slapped me when I said I loved Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, when I said Fidel Castro was handsome in his youth,” Jeanette recalls. But as the story unfolds, the true source of Carmen’s feelings begins to surface, unveiling something far more visceral and far harder to understand.

What I found most compelling about Of Women and Salt was not Jeannette’s, Carmen’s, Gloria’s, and Ana’s narratives of origin, but rather their narratives of self-constructed settlement and identity. Once immigrating to the U.S., Gloria and Ana are reduced to their country of origin and criminalized as “aliens” – as people from whom Americans must “take back” the country. By contrast, the “Cuban elite” in Miami maintain that “we’re not like them, we belong here, we’re political refugees.” “In Miami,” Garcia tells us,

“Cuban is synonymous with white. In Miami, Cubans will scoff when you call them Latino. ‘I’m not Latino, I’m Cuban,’ they will say. By which they mean, I am white, another kind of white you don’t know about, outsider.”

Thanks to Garcia’s trenchant and descriptive prose, Of Women and Salt is not just intellectually provocative, but sensorially transportive. As readers, we can not only imagine, but actually feel like we’re in nineteenth-century Cuba with its “sugarcane,” “tobacco dust,” and “sea-salt-washed plantations”; Miami with its “sticky” nights, “peacocks,” “Faux-Spanish street markets,” and “vine-laden fences”; or even a modern-day detention center with its “mud-colored trays” and “metal and gray slides,” situated on “an industrial playground for robot children.”

Regarding Of Women and Salt, I wish that, as readers, we could have received as much character development for Gloria and Ana as for Jeanette and Carmen, though the way in which Garcia bridges their four stories is nothing short of brilliant. Ultimately, what connects the four women is not their “trauma of displacement,” but rather the difficult choices – the “constant calculation[s]” – that they must make as mothers and daughters. “Don’t believe the mothers who tell you motherhood is vocation or sacrifice or beauty or anything on a greeting card,” writes Garcia. No, motherhood is a “question mark” – an endless search for inheritance; a fight to weave “the future out of the scraps.”