Anand Giridharadas, a New York Times columnist and author, came to the Lansing Community College's library to discuss his book, 'The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas.' The book evaluates many aspects of America, and of the American Dream. I was able to talk with him a bit on his most recent novel, and the relevancy of a 2001 hate crime in today's America.
Here is the compete interview.
Jon Szerlag: You are a New York Times columnist and author, how is it that 'True American,' came to be, how did it come to fruition?
Anand Giridharadas: I was thinking a lot about something we are all aware of in different ways right now, which is a question of the American Dream seeming to come apart. Thinking about that kind of unraveling. That was in 2011, and I write narrative books, so that theme was all fine and good but I needed a story I could sink my teeth into. One day I saw this story in the paper of this guy who was executed in Texas, but in his final days one of his victims of a shooting spree after 9/11 has been fighting to save his life.
Most of the stories in the newspaper are a variation of a story you have heard 100 times, with a new person or a new party or an new number here and there. This is one of those rare stories where I was like, "I have never heard a version of that story." Where a victim is fighting to save someone's life from the death penalty.
That was at 9 a.m., and I started to going into an internet rabbit hole about the case, and by 11 a.m. I decided I wanted to really spend a lot of time learning more about this. First for a magazine piece and then for a book.
Because from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. I realized that every other theme in American life was also in this story. Everything else we were debating as a country were also in this story. Healthcare. That year healthcare was a big topic. There is a healthcare component of this story. A guy gets shot in the face and gets kicked out of a hospital because it counts as a pre-existing condition.
There is a kind of an, obviously, hate crime and that whole Islamophobia. The story is about an immigrant. This story is about white supremacy and resentment. It is a story an America that still works better than any other country on earth, and right beside it an America that is arguably the least successful industrial country in the civilized world.
It had it all, and I thought if I could just tell the story of these two men and the people around them, I could start to form a picture of where America was as a society in this moment we are in.
Szerlag: One topic that is within the first couple chapters is how [Raisuddin Bhuiyan] came to America with an illusion, I guess you could say, of what it would be like, and then you wrote how he was alone and poor, instead of what it was like back home for him [in Bangladesh] and being poor with others, in a community...
Giridharadas: It's interesting you picked that out. There are a lot of themes in the book, to me, that is one of the core, core, core themes of the book. That is why I wanted to write it. My family came into this country from India. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After going to college in this state, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I moved to India, where I have never lived before. I lived there for six years and I was a reporter there.
I then came back here and immersed myself in this world of a very different poverty in and around Dallas, Texas. The most striking thing to me was this fact of the vast majority of poor people in the world are embedded in communities. It's a bitter consolation prize for being poor. It is better to not be poor, obviously. But it is a fact, that if you go to Nigeria, or to India, or go to Columbia, the poorer you are, the more people you tend to have. The more people that tend to live in your apartment, or house. The more people that you have loaned money from, or borrowed money from...whatever.
There is a lot of mutualism that comes with poverty. And that is part of why people are poor, and how they survive poverty. It is not something to be glamorized in anyway. I think a lot of our thinking about poverty is essentially based on that world, and I think America has created a pretty new situation in the world where we have poverty after individualism. And the reason you don’t have that in Europe is that they have developed a much more robust safety net. They believe in the state taking over the role that family and community used to play.
So, this is over simplified, but you have a vast developed world, where people who are poor have community. You have Europe where you have people who are poor have the state. And now there is kind of this outland where people who are poor have neither have the old world of community, because that has been destroyed because we all live quite far apart from one another. Nor has the state yet decided to come in and take that role in other places like Europe.
It just occurred to me, that is a very, quite rare and unique, condition on the world. Instead of explaining it abstractly like the way I just have, having a guy from Bangladesh, just be a little shocked by that, which he was. It helped me to see it and illuminate it a way that felt different in a way that interests me.
Szerlag: In the book there are these two worlds coming together, clashing, was there any challenges in telling this story...
Giridharadas: One of the challenges, is that it is very hard to write about spiritual motivation Anyone's spiritual motivation. Have you seen Social Network? Because people in Hollywood could not understand the idea that people who build technology build it because it is the most pleasurable thing imaginable to build for those who build amazing technology. Because they couldn’t fathom that, they had to create a Hollywood story about how he built technology to get the girl, avenge some people … They had to convert it into motives they understand.
I think spirituality is a similar thing. It is just as hard for you and I to understand the pleasure [Mark] Zuckerburg gets from building Facebook. It is very hard to understand people's religious experience, even if you are religious, it is hard to understand someone else's religious experience.
In this case, I am not a religious person. And to write about religious person's revelation that he has to make this decision to serve humanity and to serve others, and then to forgive this guy. I really had to ask him over and over again. I really had to think about it. I felt like I got closer and closer and closer, and in some ways it’s a black box still to me. We are many with black boxes to each other always.
It was very interesting to try to understand that, but not do what movies do, which is try to launder the real motivation to some other fake motivation that would be more easily understood. To be true to how this happened for everybody.
I think how this happened for him as a spiritual debt he felt he had and a sense, in a more secular feeling, that America had been good to him, in a way that it has not been good to a native born American who shot him in the face. I think that kind of set the motivation, that spiritual revelation came together in this incredibly powerful way.
Szerlag: [The shooting took place in 2001, a month after 9/11, and the case took place in 2011], how is the book, the situation still relevant in today's time, has things changed from your perspective?
Giridharadas: Sadly, this book is a little more relevant now then when it came out in 2014. Sadly, in 2001 when this shooting happened there were a bunch of these shootings and attacks on Muslims, people of color and gas station workers. There were those attacks. But nobody in the American political establishment, nobody, was speaking that language.
A bunch of criminals, a handful of criminals, like Mark Stroman, were doing those things. But, had they looked for support from the Bush administration, from senators, from congressmen, from governors, they would have been hard pressed to find one quote from one member of the entire American political class – hundreds and hundreds of people – backing up what they were doing.
Today, and there are such people still fermenting hatred against these people … if you are a Mark Stroman today and you wanted to look for that kind of support, unfortunately you can find it at the highest levels of our society. You can find presidential candidates, more than one, essentially saying things that might make you feel like you are on the right track. You can find senators and congressmen saying things that might make you think you are on the right track.
That is actually an astonishing change in American life, and we have gotten so used to it that I don't think we realize how remarkable it was that a Republican administration that was very bent on war in 2001, none-the-less, never crossed this line. They did what they did, they invaded countries, but they never crossed this line of turning on their own citizens. That tells you how far we have devolved, you could say. And that is one way it is relevant.
The other way it has become more relevant is this book tried to make the case that there was a serious problem with white resentment and white working class anger. That it was simmering and threatening to boil. And I think this election, to my mind, is where that simmer became a boil. This has been a long time coming.
Szerlag: When you were writing this book, why where you thinking you needed to get this voice heard, these changes in America....
Giridharadas: I was very radicalized by just going into these communities. You know, the great thing about reporting is go into worlds and seeing things before they hit. Getting a little bit of an early warning, because it takes time for anger, something to happen in a community to become a story. It takes time for it to be voted on and those people ending up in office. There is always a lag between what is in people's hearts, what's happening in a community where it hits, kind of, national life. And I got this very, very clear sense, I mean I cannot say I predicted anything, but I got this very clear sense that we were, and I was not the only one – a book called the 'Unwinding,' came out around the same time as mine, this one called 'Coming Apart,' really helped me think about this case while I was working on it. A bunch of people were writing about this. Bob Putnam did a really good book.....
But basically saying there was this under chunk of the country. You could say half the country, you can say it is a-third of the country, but it was essentially that falling from the bottom. And that was basically devolving into a second-world country, right in the middle of a first-world country. And that is actually a crazy reality.
If you go to Europe, they don't have that problem. They have problems with immigrants and integrating immigrants, but they do not have like a parallel second-world society in the midst of their society. Like some people get cancer treatment and some people don't. They just don't have that. No country that has enough money to not have that that has it except us. It just became very clear to me that we were tired and a level of separation...forget inequality. It's separation. An economic segregation that I don't think we understood.
To me, that has since boiled over, I am sad to say.
