American Hate gives voice to the only people who matter: the survivors of hate crimes in America. It wrestles the microphone away from the frogs and Nazis, dedicating its pages to true tales of violence and hate. Aside from an introduction and constructive conclusion, even editor Arjun Singh Sethi barely exists between American Hate’s covers ... In choosing to tell the stories in the survivor’s own words, Sethi removes American Hate from the realm of journalism and places it squarely into testimony. By leaving each story in the hands of the survivors, he ensures their agency and empowerment. This is collection as corrective, a black and white anodyne. Sethi ensures the reader’s empathy, providing portrait after portrait of human beings—not victims or soundbites ... it should be required reading for schools, for workplaces, for anyone and everyone who has never been etched by the acid blood which runs through this alien nation. American Hate is the new testament which rends the shroud; it is powerful, it is crucial, and we must act to ensure it never needs to be written again.
Amid the ugly realities of contemporary America, American Hate affirms our courage and inspiration, opening a roadmap to reconciliation by means of the victims' own words ... Read American Hate for the faces Sethi puts on our national hate epidemic, and for his sobering account of the fallout—humiliation, terror, injury, and death. But read American Hate, as well, for what the last chapter terms 'Hope in a Time of Despair.' Hate may be rampant in America, but so are its antidotes: We must understand and own our history. We must speak out, for in community is power and love.
American Hate recounts the material consequences of hate violence and provides a tool that can empower communities to fight back ... Throughout American Hate, survivors testify to the outgrowth of hate that has emerged from America’s violent history and the virulent racist policies of the Trump administration. In response, Sethi offers possible solutions: to prosecute hate incidents as criminal acts; to give funding for victims of hate, and to treat hate as a public health crisis that affects not just individuals, but also communities; and to support local grassroots movements ... Sethi calls on us to reckon with our country’s violent past.
The collection presents the pain and struggle these individuals endure but also their resilience in the face of adversity ... The idea of equality under the law and freedom from harm are questioned through the individual accounts, creating a great companion to Deepa Iyer's We Too Sing America. Recommended for anyone interested in immigrant rights.
This book makes for troublesome reading, as many of the subjects report that their situations have become more difficult in the past two years ... but Sethi ends on a tentatively optimistic note about finding ways to resist hate. This angry yet hopeful work is an important document of what the United States looks like to 'the most vulnerable' among its people in 2018.
...it’s hard to dismiss Sethi’s belief that hate crime—motivated by the wish to do harm to people who are somehow different from the mainstream—is markedly on the rise ... Many of the speakers in these pages locate hate crime in a pattern of fear at the loss of white privilege, about which Sethi sensibly notes, 'these Americans have to…understand that the projects of justice and equity are not assaults on their racial identity.' A useful book for those aiming to combat latter-day bigotry, with its many targets and manifestations.
