Southbound

Starred review from March 1, 2021
Personal essays and reportage on a mixed-race feminist's social justice awakening--and the activist practice she built around it. Enjeti, a journalist, critic, and novelist, loosely arranges this collection chronologically, beginning with her childhood in the South, where she was made to feel "abnormal and abhorrent" as one of the few non-White students in her school. "I am half Indian, a quarter Puerto Rican, and a quarter Austrian," she writes. "I am an immigrant's daughter and also a daughter of the Deep South. Despite an ever increasingly diverse United States, I remain a perpetual foreigner." She closes the book discussing her recent (and fruitful) work in her home state of Georgia to get non-White voters, especially Asian Americans, to the polls. In between, her essays discuss her growing awareness of racism, sexism, and institutional injustice. The prevailing mood isn't pride from having acquired a greater awareness of those tensions, but regret over her complicity in them. She laments failing to defend a fellow National Organization for Women intern who was fired for voicing her convictions to a lawmaker; a miscarriage prompted her to question the easy sloganeering she once shouted at anti-abortion protesters. Enjeti comfortably shifts from first-person essays to reporting (on activists supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees) to literary criticism (a fine piece on how minority characters in fiction are often designed to assuage White fragility). Not every piece lands firmly--there are scraps of poems and an earnest time-jumbling reckoning with a notorious hate crime--but the book has overall cohesiveness thanks to the author's tone: plainspoken, persistently self-questioning, and justifiably infuriated. Many readers will agree with her insights on voter suppression and racism, but agreement, she insists throughout, means little unless it translates into action. Writing on the AIDS crisis, Enjeti argues that too often condemnations of homophobia "did not involve discomfort, risk, or confrontation." Her book is a prod to readers to shake off their passivity. A spirited, well-turned collection suffused with cleansing anger and hunger for change.

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