In college I was assigned to read Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles (1992). To say it is a book that has stuck with me would be an understatement. Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay (2019) reads as a companion piece, or perhaps a sequel, toggling between the early 1990s and the late 2010s to examine what happens when a racially-charged crime goes unpunished. The protagonists are Shawn Matthews, a Black man whose sister‘s murder in the 90s by a Korean shop worker became a rallying cry for racial […]