United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope

Kinney (Avidly Reads Opera), a professor of writing at the New School, offers an all over the map exploration of rejection in personal, political, and historical contexts. Rejections come in many shapes and sizes, Kinney notes: defectors spurn their homelands; revolutionaries deny their governments; and institutions exclude people from leadership roles (see the Catholic church’s rejection of female priests). She focuses in particular on rejections that stem from systemic inequalities, discussing how unfair immigration policies lead to citizenship denials and deportations, while racist hiring practices disadvantage people of color. With that in mind, she argues that quintessentially American narratives about rejection—namely, that it must be dealt with by simply working harder to measure up—are counterproductive and unfair because they ask people to aspire to arbitrary standards rooted in unequal systems. Instead, she calls for dismantling such oppressive structures, finding fresh ways of conceptualizing acceptance, and embracing failure’s unexpected benefits, like opening up spaces for new opportunities. Kinney provides especially intriguing commentary on the harms of can-do, self-improvement–focused responses to rejection, though her framework is so broad that she sometimes struggles to connect all her examples to the thesis. The result is a thought-provoking but uneven take on a universal phenomenon. (May)