“The problem with living outside the law,” Truman Capote once wrote, “is that you no longer have its protection.” I never felt protected by the law. I didn’t understand why the law was the way it was. To pass as an American, I always had to question the law. Not just break it, not just circumvent it, but question it. I had to interrogate how laws are created, how illegality must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom. I had to realize that throughout American history, legality has forever been a construct of power. Lynchings, violent seizures of indigenous land,
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