In our family, my aunt Burnette was the designated photographer. Or at least that was what I thought when, as a child, I’d page through the family photo albums at her home. Her beautiful portraits—of my cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and great-grandparents in southeastern Wisconsin—captured silly faces, warm cuddles, flawless stunting. She documented the fact of us. I wasn’t aware at the time that I was studying composition, depth of field, mood, and intimacy when looking at her pictures. Only now is it clear to me that those books provided an early visual literacy for the extraordinary in ordinary Black life.

I was reminded of those lessons when reading Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life, by the multidisciplinary artist Renata Cherlise. The book expands on a long-standing project of Cherlise’s, which began in 2011 as a Tumblr page and then developed into its own website. Black Archives is a tangible and intimate artifact that widens the idea of Blackness in the United States, bridging past, present, and future through familial archiving practices. The book honors the craft and contribution of the amateur family photographer, an unsung figure who has for generations captured and preserved the most delicate moments of Black life.

Black Archives conveys the idea that family snapshots and portraits can serve as a respite from the outside world and its gaze. (Reprinted with permission from Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life, by Renata Cherlise.)

With Cherlise’s astute curation, Black Archives shows charming patterns present in family snapshots, the bulk of which are from the early 1940s to the late ’90s. She prioritizes photos that show tenderness and pride in the subjects’ quotidian life: parents posing with their children on their porch, Christmas mornings, grand evenings out, birthdays, weddings. “Black mediocrity is still exceptional, right?” Cherlise said in 2021 of the project. “It’s still worthy of documentation and still worthy of being highlighted from an archive.” Much of the imagery of Black people in the U.S., especially imagery circulated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, objectified and dehumanized them. Consequently, representations of Black life in the collective American memory exist largely on opposite sides of a spectrum—extreme degradation or extreme representations of excellence to counter that degradation. Cherlise’s work asks, What, then, of the middle ground?

[Read: The dark underside of representations of slavery]

The selection of images in Black Archives includes Cherlise’s own family photos and crowdsourced pictures from the public. It also features striking portraits from institutional archives, such as the Lower Roxbury Black History Project at Northeastern University. Cherlise has said that this project began when she searched historical archives in Jacksonville, Florida, for images of Black people around the public-housing complex where she spent the first three years of her life; instead, she mainly found documentation of blight and disrepair. Her observation is similar to one I made when I searched the Milwaukee County Historical Society for archival images of my Bronzeville neighborhood, and encountered scant photos of buildings and intersections before they were cleared for interstate-highway construction. Ultimately, Cherlise’s endeavor led her to the private photo collections of Black families.

The vulnerability that each photo telegraphs connotes trust between the photographer and the subject. (Reprinted with permission from Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life, by Renata Cherlise.)

Black Archives conveys the idea that family snapshots and portraits can serve as a respite from the outside world and its gaze. Whether it’s a shirtless father holding his newborn, couples leaning into each other, or children frolicking in winter’s first snowfall, the subjects are all seemingly comfortable in their skin. The vulnerability that each photo telegraphs connotes trust between the photographer and the subject. Of this sort of documentary, bell hooks once wrote, “To enter black homes in my childhood was to enter a world that valued the visual, that asserted our collective will to participate in a noninstitutionalized curatorial process … Photographs taken in everyday life, snapshots in particular, rebelled against all those photographic practices that reinscribed colonial ways of looking and capturing the images of the black ‘other.’” As a result, these depictions reflect family members with a softness and whimsy.

Contemporary Black photographers’ work has also been significant in heralding the familial snapshot. Fine artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier and Deana Lawson, for instance, have expanded the American consciousness with photography that counters dominant visual narratives. Frazier’s portraiture of her family in Braddock, Pennsylvania, upends canonical fiction about working-class Americans. And Lawson’s portraits depict the raw glamour of Black families of modest means. The amateur family photographer, however, is less interested in what a photo has to say about Blackness in America. They are principally concerned with photography that communicates the fact and delight of simply existing, the enduring hope being that relatives will remember and relish the feeling behind the picture. Still, Black Archives asserts that these family snapshots viewed in the aggregate become a fine art of sorts—in conversation with the work of professional artists—because their composers broker power and agency in each shot.

The amateur family photographer is principally concerned with photography that communicates the fact and delight of simply existing. (Reprinted with permission from Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life, by Renata Cherlise.)

The pleasure of viewing photographs in Black Archives derives mainly from the fact that none of the images are abstract, and they don’t engage in righteous protest, defending, or rebelling against cultural and social erasure. The book’s pages are dedicated to familiar joys and listless days, to the sense of personhood that remained intact while the war for civil rights continued just outside the frame. Audiences can bear witness to loving moments across decades and generations, perhaps recognizing themselves and the bonds they carry in these shared memories of home.

Attorney General Merrick Garland says civil rights probe documented excessive force and bias against Black residents.

The Justice Department issued a scathing critique Wednesday on the Louisville Metro Police Department after a nearly two-year review it launched into the force following the botched raid that killed Breonna Taylor.

Why is the United States so exceptionally violent? In 2021, for example, more than 26,000 Americans were murdered—a homicide rate that would be unthinkable in the affluent market democracies of Europe and East Asia. There are any number of explanations for America’s outlier status, including deep-seated cultural characteristics and the prevalence of firearms. But we suggest a different, more parsimonious perspective: This high level of violence is a policy choice brought about by insufficient action. We are so violent because we underinvest in our criminal-justice system.

That may seem counterintuitive amid claims that the U.S. spends excessively on public order and safety, and a movement to “defund the police.” But across all levels of government, the U.S. spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on policing, a share that has declined since the Great Recession. Our level of spending and the number of police officers we employ per capita put us in the middle of the pack relative to our OECD peers, even though our crime rate is far higher. And police-employment rates are declining, a concern police leaders were raising as early as 2019.

Then there is the structural fact that U.S. police departments are far more fragmented than those of our peer countries—the U.K. has 43 distinct police departments, whereas the U.S. has about 18,000. One result of our idiosyncratic approach to financing law enforcement is that poor and nonwhite jurisdictions have far less police protection than richer and whiter jurisdictions do. All this “under-policing” contributes to higher murder rates, especially in predominantly Black communities.

The problem doesn’t stop with policing. Court backlogs ballooned during the coronavirus pandemic, but even before then, courts were already taking too long to clear cases: According to research from the National Center for State Courts, just 30 percent of felony criminal cases were disposed of within 90 days, compared with the national standard of 75 percent. Our data on crime are in disarray too—in 2021, the FBI was forced to statistically guess at nationwide crime rates.

[Alec MacGillis: The cause of the crime wave is hiding in plain sight]

Some might object that the United States is home to a large and well-funded network of prisons, at least as measured by the number of people we incarcerate in them. But by other measures, we surely don’t spend enough. In-custody deaths are at shockingly high levels. A quarter to half of former prisoners reoffend within five years of release. And ex-offenders are massively overrepresented among the homeless population—a reflection, in no small part, of the inadequacy of the services available to people transitioning out of prison. Our penitentiaries house a large number of offenders, but that doesn’t mean they have the resources to protect and rehabilitate them.

One could trace this chronic underinvestment at least as far back as the Jim Crow South, when underfunded law-enforcement agencies were strikingly indifferent to violence against Black Americans. In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, the legal academic William J. Stuntz observed that whereas killers of white Americans in that era could generally expect a vigorous response from the criminal-justice system, killers of Black Americans, regardless of race, were very likely to go free. And, as the journalist Jill Leovy observed in Ghettoside, that era’s absence of effective crime control in Black communities gave rise to vigilantism: Many Black individuals who found no recourse in turning to the law felt compelled to take matters into their own hands.

That pattern reverberates even now. In 2020, for example, Black Americans were the victims in 61 percent of all gun homicides, most of which go unsolved and unpunished by the law. Assuming they are apprehended and punished at all, offenders whose victims are Black can be expected to receive lighter sentences than those whose victims are not Black. In some zip codes in the United States, young Black men are more likely to be killed than if they served in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan.

This endemic violence has devastated the civic infrastructure of many American cities. Lawlessness gives rise to middle-class flight, which in turn shrinks the tax bases that finance local law enforcement. The isolation and deprivation that result are nothing less than a moral scandal.

[Nicholas Dawidoff: Poverty is violent]

The criminal-justice system affects millions of people every year, yet this crisis of underinvestment has been largely overlooked. Indeed, recent years have seen renewed liberal support for disinvestment in the criminal-justice system, propelled by the widely held view that we over-police communities of color and over-incarcerate.

The woefully unpopular “defund the police” movement is only the most visible manifestation of rising support for disinvestment. It has also appeared in the push to shift many functions—including traffic enforcement and public-order maintenance—out of the criminal-justice system and often into the (less accountable) NGO sector, and in the imposition of unfunded mandates on police departments and prisons in the name of reform.

This approach is perhaps best understood as a sort of progressive version of “starve the beast,” the conservative theory that slashing taxes forces cuts in government programs. Advocates of criminal-justice reform argue in effect that because the system is broken, we should defund rather than fix it. They point to police misconduct and violence as evidence that policing doesn’t work, not that policing needs more resources. They point to slow courts as a reason to release suspects pretrial, rather than asking how to ensure speedy trials. They point to the worst conditions in America’s prisons and jails as a reason to decarcerate, but they don’t talk about how to make incarceration more humane and less criminogenic.

This “starve the beast” approach is particularly peculiar from the left, which usually identifies government dysfunction as a product of underinvestment. In this case, that prescription is correct: Improving our criminal-justice system means spending the requisite money to address America’s horrific and long-standing problem with criminal violence.

One leader who seems to understand this is President Joe Biden. The White House has pushed back against “starve the beast” progressivism, floating a $37 billion public-safety plan. Some of its investments—including $13 billion for the COPS Hiring Program and investments in court case-management tools—are smart steps in the right direction. But it also spends billions on alternatives to the criminal-justice system, including community-violence-intervention programs whose efficacy is at best unproven, and alternative responders who address just a fraction of police calls for service. It’s worth researching how these programs work at scale, but handing them $20 billion before that’s done seems unwise at best.

What could and should garner bipartisan support is a more focused package, one that concentrates federal dollars on improving the institutions we know keep us safe. Hiring tens of thousands of police officers, as Biden wants to do, is a good start. So is funding to help courts expedite case processing, particularly by modernizing case-management software and practices—which would in turn help bring backlogs under control. An obvious third area is rehabilitating failing prisons and jails. In addition, funding for research, evaluation, and statistics—which pays for both crime data and criminological research—has plummeted in recent years. Charging the Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, with making creative investments would make our system both smarter and tougher.  

Why are these more traditional tools of crime control the right way to fight crime? Because decades of evidence show that they work. Studies of federally subsidized police-hiring grants consistently find that cities that receive the grants reduce crime compared with those that don’t. One study found that the burst of hiring overseen by the Obama administration prevented four violent crimes and 15 property crimes for each cop hired. For every 10 percent increase in police-force size, another estimate suggests, violent-crime rates drop by 13 percent and property-crime rates by 7 percent.

The benefits of funding don’t stop with police. The speed with which courts dispose of cases has been considered central to criminal deterrence for centuries. Supporting this, probation programs that impose what experts call “swift, certain, and fair” sentences—a short jail stay—have been shown to deter drug offenders in Hawaii and drunk drivers in South Dakota. And it’s intuitive that worse prisons engender more crime: Research from Colombia finds that as-if-random assignment to a newer, better prison reduces an offender’s risk of reincarceration within one year by 36 percent.

In short, spending on our criminal-justice system’s capacity offers palpable, proven returns. This is particularly significant against the enormous costs of crime, estimated at more than $600 billion in 2017 alone—mostly due to violence. If we have a pressing problem, and tools that can address it, how can we not use one to resolve the other?

Some conservatives may blanch at expanding federal spending amid soaring inflation and a looming debt crisis. But a small increase in the federal government’s already limited outlays for public safety—about $66 billion in 2021—could be compensated for with spending cuts on less-effective programs. And although state and local policy makers should lead the way, the federal government has long used the power of the purse to backstop the provision of the state’s most basic function: public safety.

Standing up to “starve the beast” progressivism makes sense electorally. But it is also the right thing to do for our too-violent nation. Every year, tens of thousands of people are murdered. We can do more, much more, to stop the bleeding, if only we spend what’s necessary to meet our most basic civic obligation: protecting public order and safety.

When I was in school, American history was taught as a series of triumphs over wrongs that belonged to the past. Slavery was evil, but the Civil War ended it; then the civil-rights movement ended segregation. The vote was extended to more and more Americans—starting with white men, then women, Black people, and finally even 18-year-olds—thus fulfilling the promise of democracy. There was no atoning for the near elimination of Native Americans, but somehow it didn’t invalidate the story of progress. Abroad, the U.S. led the cause of freedom against fascism and communism; Japanese internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam were mistakes that didn’t erase the larger picture. It was an optimistic narrative, reassuring, shallow, and badly in need of a corrective.  

We’re now living in a golden age of fatalism. American culture—movies and museums, fiction and journalism—is consumed with the most terrible subjects of the country’s history: slavery, Native American removal, continental conquest, the betrayal of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, colonialism, militarism. In scholarship, works whose objective is to puncture our hopeful but misguided myths dominate, and titles such as Unworthy Republic, The End of the Myth, Illusions of Emancipation, and Stamped From the Beginning claim prestigious prizes. This mode of analysis doesn’t just revise our understanding of American history, illuminating areas of darkness that most people don’t know and perhaps would rather not. It also draws a straight line from past to present.  

In a country world-famous for constant transformation, historical fatalism believes that nothing ever really changes. Mass incarceration is “the new Jim Crow”; modern police departments are the heirs of slave patrols. Historical fatalism combines inevitability and essentialism: The present is forever trapped in the past and defined by the worst of it. The arrival of the first slave ship on these shores in 1619 marked, according to The New York Times Magazine, “the country’s true birth date” and “the foundation on which this country is built.” Cruelty, inequity, and oppression endure in the American character not only as elements of a complex whole but as its very essence. Any more ambiguous view—one that sees the United States as a flawed experiment, marked by slow, fitful progress—is an illusion, and a dangerous one.

[Read: The new history wars]

The new fatalism has its own historical causes, and they’re not hard to see: the failures of the War on Terror and the neoliberal economy, stubborn inequality, the disappointments of the Obama presidency, videos of police brutality, global warming, the rise of Donald Trump. There is no shortage of evidence to justify a dark interpretation of American history. But what’s striking is how eagerly the new fatalism crosses from empiricism into metaphysics. In search of original facts, historians and journalists go digging where the ugliest facts are buried, and what begins in research ends in dogma. They aren’t just looking to fill in gaps of knowledge, or going where the historical evidence leads them. Instead they replace one myth with another one, as powerful and even attractive in its way as the naive story of July 4, 1776, being the fountain of liberty and equality for all. Disillusionment is as appealing to some temperaments as wishful thinking is to others.

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University, is a gem of the new fatalism. Synthesizing brilliant research in fluent prose, and writing with an indignation that’s all the more damning for being understated, Cowie explores the history of Barbour County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, at the southeastern corner of the state. Here, white settlers drove out Creek Indians in the early 19th century; white planters made cotton fortunes on the seized land with Black slave labor; defeated white Confederates restored their wealth and power using Black convict labor and a Jim Crow constitution; white mobs enforced their racist social order with lynchings. When the civil-rights movement eventually reached Barbour County, in the mid-1960s, white politicians kept Black voters out of power with intimidation and chicanery. By then, a native son of Barbour County named George Wallace was ruling Alabama as its arch-segregationist governor and taking the cause of white resistance national.

Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination. At every turn in the harsh tale of Barbour County, white residents resisted challenges to their supremacy by invoking their birthright as free people. At nearly every turn, the federal government made inadequate efforts on behalf of equal Black citizenship, before yielding to the demands of white “freedom” backed by violence. “Those defending racism, land appropriation, and enslavement portrayed themselves, and even understood their own actions, as part of a long history of freedom,” Cowie writes. In his infamous 1963 inaugural address vowing “segregation forever,” Governor Wallace used the word freedom 24 times. To Wallace and his constituents, the real tyrant was the federal government, issuing its court orders and sending down its marshals and troops to impose its laws against the will of white Alabamians. Cowie quotes a blunt question from the 18th-century British essayist Samuel Johnson that could have been the book’s epigraph: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

In the uses of freedom, Cowie argues, domination is as central to the American creed as individual liberty and self-government. Freedom as white power “is not an aberration but a virulent part of an American idiom.” The history of Barbour County “was not much different than what happened in the rest of the Black Belt, the South, or the nation.” For proof, Cowie recounts the nationwide appeal of Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 (“We’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country,” Wallace said before the ’68 election). The stories Cowie has excavated in Barbour County “are not simply regional tales lost in the dark, overgrown thickets of the past. They are quintessentially American histories—inescapably local, yet national in theme, scope, and scale.” The historian concludes: “To confront this saga of freedom is to confront the fundamentals of the American narrative.”

These claims are the heart of Cowie’s book. In one sense, they’re incontestable. Few Americans today embrace the overt goal of white supremacy, but the freedom to take away someone else’s rights at gunpoint is as American as the freedom to insult the president or make a pile of money. If you drive through rural Pennsylvania, you’ll see the Stars and Bars flying from houses in towns where the main square features a monument with a long honor roll of Union dead. The January 6 insurrectionists carried Gadsden banners and Confederate flags and railed against government jackboots. Though they might not state it openly, for some Americans Black equality + the federal government = tyranny is a permanent equation.

But on second glance, there’s something strange and willful about picking Barbour County, Alabama, as the exemplary American place. It would be hard to find a more brutal and benighted one, but fatalism makes the selection understandable. The Times recently published an op-ed under the headline “What If Hale County, Ala., Is the Heart of America?” Hale County—about 200 miles northwest of Barbour—was the setting for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Depression-era portrait of white tenant farmers; today the county’s Black majority remains deeply impoverished. Perhaps Barbour County and Hale County are the twin hearts of America.

My mother’s side of the family comes from Birmingham, Alabama, which is notorious for its history of white supremacy and violence. But the recent history of Birmingham, with its Black mayors and progressive politics, tells a somewhat less fatalistic story than Cowie’s tale of Barbour County. Another historian might argue that the history of Kings County, New York, where I’m writing this essay, can equally claim to represent the nation’s past. What if Brooklyn were the heart of America? That would give a very different picture of freedom—one largely shaped by immigration, ethnic competition, coalition building, and liberal state power, in addition to racial discrimination. But it might be better not to go looking for the national essence anywhere.

Cowie tells us that he wanted to write about white resistance to federal power, and “Barbour County found me.” He did indeed go digging where the ugliest facts lay buried, some quite close to the surface. When he took the step from writing superb history to diagnosing American character, the choice of place determined the conclusion. But constructing a narrative of the country’s past is the business of everyone, not just the professionals, and getting the facts right isn’t enough. As the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, “Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” The stories we tell ourselves about the past allow us to see the country we want.

Did America become America in 1619, or 1776, or some other year? There is no objective answer. The answer is a choice, an expression of values, and the choice implies a story. Politics is a competition between stories—and it’s as politics that the new fatalism leads to a dead end. On a landscape strewn with the deflated remnants of old myths, with the country’s essence distilled to its meanest self, what moral identity is it possible to build? Punctured myths make us better students of history, but they leave nothing to live up to. Shame is a shaky foundation for any project of renewal. You can’t tell someone that he’s made a mess of his life because of his own bad character and then expect him to change. “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals,” Rorty wrote: “a necessary condition for self-improvement.”

[Read: The rise of anti-history]

Cowie argues for a new narrative to combat that of Barbour County: “a vigorous, federally enforced model of American citizenship that is not afraid to fight the many incarnations of the freedom to dominate.” In other words, he wants the United States to start doing what, in his telling, it has largely failed to do for 200 years. But white resistance to federal power runs so deep in Freedom’s Dominion that no other model is plausible. If Barbour County is the dark heart of America, the course of the story is foretold. Progressive scholarship makes progressive politics seem hopeless.

Our political moment, composed of catastrophism and stagnation, offers no obvious way out. This impasse produces the magical thinking of fatalism: History is a living nightmare—wake up to justice! A popular idea calls for change by plebiscite and demography: Rewrite the Constitution, get rid of its anti-majoritarian features, create true democracy, and a new majority will carry out the progressive policies the country wants. In Two Cheers for Politics, the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy makes an eloquent case for more democracy as the path to national renewal. He suggests extending the franchise to noncitizens and holding a new constitutional convention every 27 years. Purdy acknowledges that democracy means giving power to people and ideas you might not like. Still, I sense he believes—despite election after election showing this country to be almost evenly split—that the correct majority will rule.

There’s no shortcut out of our impasse. The only way forward is on the long road of organization and persuasion. This is the theme of Timothy Shenk’s recent book Realigners. “There’s no one thread tying the history of American democracy together, no abiding center, no single answer,” Shenk writes. “But there is a recurring question: How can you build an electoral majority?” Shenk—whose progressive credentials include co-editing Dissent magazine—rejects “skeleton-key histories” such as the new fatalism that draws “a straight line from slavery in the seventeenth century to systemic racism in the twenty-first.” Realigners is about Americans—political leaders and thinkers, given that democratic politics is a contest among elites for popular legitimacy—who changed the country by helping to create majorities that lasted long enough to break with the past. They’re not the usual suspects. Shenk’s protagonists include the Democratic Party kingpin Martin Van Buren; the radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner; Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s campaign mastermind; W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippmann, Bayard Rustin, Phyllis Schlafly.

Shenk’s portraits and stories are not the stuff of utopian dreams. Electoral majorities are extremely hard to build in our system. They depend on the convergence of public sentiments, historical events, political talent, institution building, and luck. They have to sustain contradictions and bring opponents together in unlikely coalitions. They never last more than a couple of decades. The only constant is change. The new fatalism gives us an open-and-shut vision of the past, but for inspiration in shaping the future, we have to look elsewhere.

Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday? I told them the same story my adoptive parents had told me: My birth parents were unable to take care of a fragile, premature baby. They believed that another family would provide me with a better life. And so I was adopted and became my parents’ beloved only child—a “miracle,” they called it, evidence of God’s goodness. When your family is formed by divine will, who are you to question it? To wonder about the family you never knew?

Like Matthew Pratt Guterl, I know what it is to be raised in the belief that your family represents something far greater than itself. Whereas my parents saw our adoptive family as proof of God’s handiwork, Bob and Sheryl Guterl saw theirs as a new kind of “ark for the age of the nuclear bomb, of race riots, of war,” one that could change the world by example: They would raise a family of white biological children and adopted children of color—“two of every race”—and all would live in harmony behind a white-picket fence. In Skinfolk, Guterl, a professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University, assigns himself the task of reckoning with the experiment his white parents confidently embarked on.

He describes them as serious Catholics, loving and “big hearted,” convinced of their own good intentions: Bob, a respected New Jersey judge, was “the wild-eyed dreamer”; Sheryl, a teacher turned homemaker, was “the practical one.” Reading the brief autobiographies his parents submitted to Welcome House, the first international and interracial adoption agency in the United States, Guterl notes that they shared a desire for a large family, concerns about population growth, and the belief that “recycling and adoption are methods of global repair.”

[Read: Rumaan Alam ponders the limits of parental love]

As their firstborn son, he grew up alongside his brother Bug (Guterl refers to some of his siblings by name, others by childhood nickname), who came from South Korea as a baby in 1972, two years after Matthew’s birth; Mark, his only biological sibling, born in 1973; Bear, the son of a Vietnamese mother and a Black American-GI father, adopted as a 5-year-old in 1975; Anna, a biracial Korean girl, who arrived from Seoul in 1977 at the age of 13; and Eddie, a Black child adopted from the South Bronx in 1983, at the age of 6. Guterl details the ways in which the siblings were known, observed, and sometimes fetishized within and beyond their rural New Jersey town. “The whole enterprise, in accordance with Bob’s wishes, is meant to be seen,” he writes:

We are seen, and we see things … I begin to note a troubling public surveillance of our whole ensemble, our various skin tones on display. I watch as cars drive by, and see how quickly the heads turn to see the wide world of rainbow at play in our picket-fenced front yard. A game of catch. A throw of the football. Choosing up teams for Wiffle ball. With Blackness added, our performed comity means something more.

Reading this passage made me think of my own upbringing in white spaces, constantly watched and watchful. My parents believed my race was irrelevant, insisting that people cared only about who I was “on the inside”; I didn’t tell them about the slurs and barbs I heard throughout my childhood. For the Guterls, however, calling attention to the racial makeup of their family was partly the point—how else could they lead by example? Bob’s sermonizing at the dining-room table introduced the children to their parents’ mission and helped indoctrinate them early on: “We understand that our multiracial composition is a critique of the present, our color-blind consanguinity an omen of the future.” The children were expected to acknowledge and celebrate one another’s differences, and also, somehow, to transcend them.

The reality, of course, is that transracial adoption has no intrinsic power to heal racial prejudice, and Guterl and his siblings were never going to neutralize or escape its effects, much less undo the harms of white supremacy. Young Matthew discovers firsthand that the world won’t be changed by families like theirs: He is cornered and terrorized by a group of white kids because he has a Black brother; he later notices that their parents apologize to him, not to Bear. In middle school, he is so distressed at being called “N—— Lips” (again, he is targeted because he has Black siblings) that he takes the shocking step of getting cosmetic surgery on his lips. By the time he is in college, he knows that he can rebel, play pranks, even get caught speeding, and not worry that the hammer will fall on him the way it might on Bear or Eddie—not that his parents give the boys “the talk,” precisely: “Racial disparities in policing … are regular subjects of conversation at the breakfast and dinner table. Bob feels, though, that there should be no formal, separate syllabus” for his Black sons.

Throughout the book, the sibling we learn the most about, and the one Guterl seems closest to, is Bear: near enough in age to be his “twin.” Bear comes to the Guterls with a small bag of belongings and a photograph of the family he was separated from after leaving Vietnam—his older half brother’s arm on his shoulder, his mother and half sister to their left—an image that leads Guterl to reflect on “the great sorrow that he has been ripped from that set of relations with such tremendous and severing force.” By high school, Bear is a popular football player and solid student—unlike Guterl, who is aware that he lacks his brother’s star power yet also has an unearned advantage in his whiteness. Bear may be loved and widely admired in their small town, but neither his own successes nor his adoptive family can exempt him from the racism of their fellow residents. Bear “is a Black,” one of Guterl’s white friends says to him during senior year—and then comes Eddie’s turn: “But your younger brother is a n——.” Guterl freezes at this “detour into American racism,” unexpected but not unfamiliar to him.

[Read: America soured on my multiracial family]

The family meets crises that further highlight their disparities and test their bonds. An adolescent Eddie begins to “act out” in escalating ways, and Bug nurses growing anger toward Bob and Sheryl. One night, violence erupts between Eddie and Bug, and is “handled” by Bob alone—he calls Eddie’s therapist, who arranges for his admission to a nearby psychiatric institution. There, Eddie is observed, tested, medicated: “He fights it, of course, but the plot has grabbed hold of him,” Guterl writes. “And never, ever lets him go.” Eddie is in the pipeline, and moves through one disciplinary institution after another—“reform schools give way to jails and then prisons”—while Bug’s alienation from the family intensifies.

Many years later, Bear is the one who assumes primary support of Eddie, even while himself recovering from a violent assault by two white racists. By then, Bob is dead, having spent years consumed by “the need for repair and reconnection,” confused and crushed by Bug’s resistance to being reincorporated into the family. Guterl writes that his father regretted how his choices affected Eddie, and never stopped questioning what might have been had he never called the therapist and enlisted “the world—as uneven, as broken, as treacherous as it is—in the disciplining of his son.” Yet though racked by “considerable, late-in-life anguish,” Bob remained indefatigable in another sense, a firm believer in the power of their family until the end. Guterl describes his farewell letter to them all as a “paean to the foundational, even generic ideas of family, togetherness, and solidarity, in which he encourages forgiveness and begs us to stay together.”

I was interested in reading Skinfolk in part because I believe that the stories of those who have lost or gained siblings through adoption have much to tell us about families—their inner workings as well as the social expectations and tensions that shape them. As a child, Guterl had no more ability than his adopted siblings to determine the structure of their family; his life, too, was remade and ruled by Bob and Sheryl’s experiment. When I began reading his memoir, I did not think that I would find in him, the white son of white parents he has always known, a fellow seeker. But his urgent need to probe choices that he had grown up being told to believe were uncomplicated felt unexpectedly familiar.

Questioning the family mythology, that bedrock you share with those you are closest to, is no easy task. For years I had denied my wish to know more about my birth parents and my own past, and when I finally admitted it, the depth of my need and curiosity staggered me. So did the fear: How could I tell my adoptive parents that the story they had steadfastly believed, the story they had given me, was likely untrue and no longer enough? Who was I if not their contented, loyal daughter, their gift from God? I might never have searched had I not gotten pregnant with my first child, someone who I imagined would one day have her own questions about our missing history: If I could not look for answers only for myself, perhaps I could search for the two of us. Once I had begun, I found still more company in a long-lost biological sister who had believed me dead, and craved the truth even more than I did.

Guterl’s search, perhaps undertaken on behalf of his siblings, does not shy away from challenging their parents’ mission. That entails examining not just the failure of their experiment, but also the limits of their father’s ability to grasp why and how the “endeavor begins to unravel.” When Bob blames Bug’s estrangement from the family on the adoption agency, the Korean orphanage, everything and everyone beyond the white-picket fence—“Not us. Not this place. Not what has happened at our home”—Guterl suggests that this picture is incomplete: For Bug, being part of the Guterl clan, and especially accepting Bob’s overpowering vision of what the family represented, seemed to require a painful and, in the end, impossible denial of self. The historian of the family, Guterl wants to convey his perspective on the tangled truth of what has happened to him and the people he loves, aware from the start that his search—and what he uncovers—may cause him and others pain.

Though at times I felt held at a bit of a distance—Guterl is a careful writer and has clearly tried to respect his relatives’ wishes regarding their privacy—he rarely tries to protect or exonerate himself. In a late chapter, he, his brothers Bear and Mark, and their sister, Anna, reunite in 2002, a year after their father’s death. They spend the day together, and return to the house filled with a sense of camaraderie; as Guterl notes, “some of the old magic is back.” But by now, we understand that this family was never magic.

Later that night, the usual racial banter has returned, one of the comfortable grooves from our past. Anna says something in her sometimes-imperfect English—a habit when she is speaking fast, or emotional, and the sort of thing we all made sport of before. I jokingly correct her, the kind of move I made—we all made—for years without a thought. And that night, when we are all so saturated with feeling and drink, the familiar joke lands all wrong. Anna leans forward, finger pointing—at me and also at what I signify, at the vast edifice behind me.

“That is racist, and I can’t take it anymore.”

The Guterl parents’ view of adoption as an “engine of ‘reform,’ ” strong enough to override racism, set up an assignment their children couldn’t possibly fulfill. For all that Guterl has learned by the time his sister confronts him, and for all that he has come to question about how they were raised, he, too, still needs to be disabused of some assumptions. His thoughtless jibe and her pent-up hurt testify to the complexities and contradictions of the endeavor their parents enlisted them in. And he finds the encounter especially distressing because of that tension: His deep love for his sister—for each of his siblings—is what sometimes prevents him from seeing the chasm between their experiences. “As children in a family meant to undo racism, we were asked to learn—and to unlearn—race,” he writes. “To see one another as siblings—to see beyond our skin—but also, dissonantly, to see one another as color-coded … Those parallel lessons are, in the end, impossible to suture together.”

The scene made me think of my own family, and one night in particular, when my father and I were watching the 2015 Women’s World Cup. My mother joined us and asked if the athletes on-screen were Korean or Japanese, and my father replied: “Does it matter? Who can tell the difference?” I had been their child for 30-odd years. I was accustomed to biting my tongue for the sake of family cohesion. I don’t know why I couldn’t do it that day, but I still remember the trembling anger and anxiety I felt as I called someone I loved, who loved me, to account. My father, shocked, eventually apologized, but not before he told me, “It’s just hard for me to see you as Asian.”

Transracial adoption will never empower adoptees of color or our white family members to sidestep the realities of privilege, bias, and racism; as Skinfolk shows, we will meet and experience these things in the most intimate of ways, within the microcosm of our own family. Reading Anna’s challenge to her brother, one that may have been decades in the making, I knew where all my natural sympathy as an adoptee lay. My response to Guterl’s description of his agonizing confusion and self-doubt, which kept him awake for hours that night, took me by surprise. It made me catch my breath and wish that I could see or speak to my adoptive parents, both of whom are now gone, and simply feel close to them again. I know what it is to confront a painful and unwanted distance between you and those you love; to want to believe, if only for a moment, that your will alone can bridge it.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “Two of Every Race.”