‘Stranger in a Strange Land’

The Guardian has an excerpt from Gary Younge’s forthcoming book, Stranger in a Strange Land that’s very much worth a read. The book chronicles his arrival in America a couple of years after 9/11, and the work he did covering American political life. Right-wing conservatives, he writes, “badgered me as though their own reference points represented the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under European colonisation. ‘If it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking German,’ they would say. ‘No, if it wasn’t for you,’ I would tell them, ‘I would probably be speaking Yoruba.'”