My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
From the cover:
"The story that I thought/was my life/didn't start on the day/I was born
Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. 'Boys just being boys' turns out to be true only when those boys are white.
The story that I think/will be my life/starts today
Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal's bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it?"
As a white woman, I feel a little weird writing a review of a book about the disproportionate (frequently wrongful) incarceration of Black people and the broken justice system in the United States, particularly since white women so frequently and disgustingly weaponize their privilege to harm Black people and other people of color. But this book is so powerful and Amal's voice so strong, that I had to share this book in case I have friends who didn't have it on their radar. Potential spoilers included.
The book starts off with Amal's trial. We don't find out details of what happened right away, just snippets about a fight with a white teen, who ended up in a coma. Amal is found guilty and sent to a detention facility, and details of the fight gradually unfold, interspersed between his experiences in prison. We also get glimpses into the experiences of some of the other boys with him, and we see a lot of the ways in which all of the boys in this detention center have basically been abandoned to the system.
The one bright spot for Amal as he grapples with fear, hopelessness, and despair in the face of violent, racist guards, an educational program that is vastly inadequate, and very little support aside from his mother's visits, is a poetry class led by an outside volunteer. The class, basically a reward for good behavior, is one of his only connections to his life outside of prison and is a vital outlet, a place for him to use his words to remind himself of his humanity. As a volunteer-run class, though, the poetry group is not a guaranteed offering, even though without it many of the kids who attend are losing one of their only sources for a healthy outlet. What will happen to Amal and the other boys if they lose the class, and with it their connection to the one person inside the detention center who treats them like human beings?
This book may be fiction, but it was inspired by Yusef Salaam's real life experience as one of the exonerated five, and we all know that Yusef and his friends are far from the only people living in the US to have been wrongfully imprisoned (or imprisoned for bullshit reasons). Amal's story is a heartbreaking reminder not only of how the United States' decision to favor punitive action over restorative justice is failing a majority of black and brown Americans, but also of how our refusal as white people to confront our implicit biases, unlearn the white supremacist bullshit we have grown up steeped in, and use our privilege for good is propping up the rampant racism in our country.
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