This Is My America(89)

Thank you again for everything you’ve done. Congratulations on your recent case. Don’t forget us when you’re big-time. I’ve got a couple of cases you might be interested in.

Peace and solidarity,





Tracy Beaumont





Author’s Note

While This Is My America is a work of fiction, it is rooted in US history and fueled by my decades of work in education and advocacy for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Growing up, I was an activist in my community as much as a daydreamer in the library. At the time, I had trouble finding books with characters who looked like me: the gap of diverse literature from diverse writers was (and still is) staggering. Nowadays, I write the stories I wanted to read, to fill the space in between those worlds.

Racism in the criminal justice system was imprinted on me at twelve years old when Los Angeles police officers violently beat Rodney King. I was shocked at the inhumanity of his treatment, and when the video aired on national television, I thought surely justice would finally be served. But it wasn’t. When a jury acquitted the police, the Black community exploded and rioted in anger. I felt their rage. Their pain was my pain.

In 1997, I marched against police brutality for the first time at a youth rally in Pittsburgh during the NAACP national conference. The city was still rife with tension in the Black community from a few years earlier, when Jonny Gammage, a Black motorist, died of suffocation after he was pinned to the pavement by white officers. Those officers were charged with involuntary manslaughter; none were convicted.



With no books to turn to for Black protagonists, I found that rap became my life’s soundtrack, from Lauryn Hill’s lyrical prose influences through Public Enemy, Ice-T, and N.W.A teaching me that art can be used to express discontent. Rap was my generation’s tool for expression, and it was this music, not high school English classes, that taught me how to be a writer.

I wrote This Is My America to tackle serious topics and give hope to the next generation. For my son and daughter, who will one day need to find meaning. In 2014, my then-six-year-old son burst into uncontrollable tears in public after seeing video footage of Eric Garner take his last breath, held down by police officers, with no one attempting to resuscitate him. “He couldn’t breathe,” my son cried. “He couldn’t breathe, and they didn’t stop.” He worried, what if someone called the police on me because he was crying? What if the police held me down, his asthmatic mother? Then I wouldn’t be able to breathe. In that moment, I knew my son’s days of innocence were over. Corinne Beaumont’s character represents my children’s fragile innocence on the line.

This Is My America seeks to expand the now very public conversation on police brutality that the Black Lives Matter movement made possible through activism. One in three Black boys born today will be incarcerated in their lifetime. After the 1960s War on Crime, the 1970s War on Drugs, and the Crime Bill of 1994, mass incarceration skyrocketed. The prison-industrial complex is a $182 billion industry that feeds off the lives of Black, brown, and poor people caught up in its vicious cycle.*



While mass incarceration is a complex problem, I wanted to simply (ha ha) focus on how it’s almost impossible to prove someone is innocent without adequate representation. Bryan Stevenson’s incredible legacy, Just Mercy, was the first nonfiction work that made me realize I could explore topics I care most deeply about in my young adult stories. I based my character Steve Jones on Bryan Stevenson, and the fictional Innocence X on the incredible organizations Equal Justice Initiative and the Innocence Project.

Tracy Beaumont was written in honor of all the Black girls and womxn leading movements and the young womxn I advise and mentor, who are powerful beyond measure. I envision “Tracy’s Corner” as a way I would call other students to action if I were in high school today. I was a lot like Tracy, full of idealism and a desire to make the world a better place. I was president of my multicultural club and the local youth NAACP chapter in high school, and we held many meetings in the NAACP’s downtown office. In college, as a student organizer and co-president of the Black student union, I worked to bring my peers together to talk about important issues and try to effect change. Now I work on a college campus as an ally and advocate, and I bear witness to my students’ active engagement.



This Is My America is a piece of fiction; if this story were true, there wouldn’t be an immediate happy ending for the Beaumonts. They would continue to live in the same society, combating racial prejudice and inequality—with all the disadvantages and stains of post-prison survival and recovery. I wanted to leave my readers with hope but nevertheless reflect real-life struggles, which is why Tracy’s friend Tasha and her family are still on an uphill journey of life after prison at the end of the novel.

This Is My America’s DNA is embedded from beginning to end with complex topics that impact Black Americans today. The Beaumonts’ story showcases how generational trauma caused by mass incarceration reverberates throughout the Black American experience today. The story weaves past and present. It is based as much on Thurgood Marshall’s story told in Devil in the Grove as it is on Just Mercy. The present is still a reflection of the past.

The death penalty is one of today’s most horrifying examples of the legacy of slavery. This is why I selected the topic of the death penalty out of many issues of mass incarceration. This history began as early as 1619, when African slaves were brought to the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Legal bondage of those enslaved and their descendants continued until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment ended de jure slavery in 1865. During the Reconstruction era, Southern whites rebelled against the end of slavery, and a terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan, was born. By 1870, Klan representation had expanded to almost every state. Slavery had ended, except as a punishment for a crime. So former slaves found themselves being charged with vague crimes like “loitering.” The country had profited from slavery, and prisoners became a viable exception for use of free labor.