In his excellent essay in this collection, On the Blackness of the Panther, Teju Cole asks: what’s a black panther, anyway? It isn’t a species. It’s a black jaguar or a black leopard. Blackness is “melanistic variants”, Cole explains, in a big cat’s coat colour. As a Nigerian immigrant to America, it’s in his new home that he’s called, for the first time, black. It was never a descriptor in Lagos. The American immigrant experience necessarily involves labels, and this can feel blanketing and erasing. It’s bad enough that we are immigrants, we are also – particularly if we are immigrants of colour – put into broad and limiting categories: “black” to describe a multitude of experiences, “Asian” to lump together whole countries and cultures, “brown” even more obliquely. To whom are these categories convenient?

The Good Immigrant USA follows the publication of The Good Immigrant in 2016, which comprised pieces from 21 British writers of colour. The title itself is tongue-in-cheek, calling attention to the absurdity of using “good” and “bad” to catalogue millions of individuals. In their introduction the book’s editors, Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman, write: “The title was a response to the narrative that immigrants are ‘bad’ by default until they prove themselves otherwise. They are job stealers, benefit scroungers, girlfriend thieves, and criminals. Only when they win an Olympic medal, treat you at your local hospital, or rescue a child from the side of the building do they become good.”

The follow-up is a well-curated set of essays from writers and artists including Nicole Dennis-Benn, Mona Chalabi, Alexander Chee, Maeve Higgins, Porochista Khakpour, Daniel José Older and Jenny Zhang. Yann Demange and Fatimah Asghar touch on that broken-record question, where are you from? Suleyman succinctly describes America as a nation that “should not be white at all yet sees only through the lens of whiteness”. This is at the centre of what the authors grapple with.

The book – and this should not come as a surprise – chronicles many of the ways in which the immigrant experience can be terrible. As Jade Chang writes: “There’s a form of currency from immigrants and people of colour that publishers, producers, and audiences have long recognised: pain. Whether it’s the larger pain of being a refugee or an enslaved person, or the smaller-scale pain of not fitting in, for a long time these were the only stories that got told. Or, rather, the only stories that got sold.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Director Yann Demange is among contributors who touch on that question, where are you from? Photograph: Victoria Will/Invision/AP

There is plenty of that pain to be exorcised, still. In No Es Suficiente, Dani Fernandez recalls: “There was a white girl in my class, Emily, who used to tease me for my last name. ‘Fernandez? Your dad is my gardener.’ I remember I turned to her and said, ‘My dad works in advertising.’” Fatima Farheen Mirza recalls the time her family, living in Texas, was given a bag of Skittles from their neighbour’s young daughter. Just days before, on September 2016, Donald Trump Jr had tweeted: “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you that just three would kill you, would you take a handful? This is our Syrian refugee problem.”

Basim Usmani’s delightful and sobering Tour Diary describes being on the road with his punk band, the Kominas, through different cross-sections of America. He is stopped on the way back to the US through Niagara Falls, where a Homeland Security agent asks: “How Muslim are you? Like on a scale of one to ten?” Usmani articulates so well the immigrant’s fear: “I’m scared of what I symbolise to people who don’t know me.” Jim St Germain describes his young adulthood in Crown Heights, where friends were murdered: Jigga, Breeze, Dread, Nate. “Or my friend Reggie, who was stabbed while sitting on the ‘Jewish Steps’ playing dominoes. And Patrice, who was shot in the leg over a game of dice.”

The ways in which categorisation is harmful are obvious – and all are well detailed in this book. Yet it’s not so simple. Generalisations are convenient not only to white Americans, immigrants use these groupings too. We – yes, “we” – have to. The recounting of smelly lunches, side-eyed glances, childhood taunts and parental expectations is a means of solidarity, and is needed. “Part of loneliness comes from having to explain the things you think everyone should know but they don’t,” Asghar writes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We lost the election’ … Jade Chang. Photograph: (c) Emma McIntyre

I am an immigrant to America. I was made fun of for the way I said things and the way my parents said them, and learned quickly to adapt; a boy once gave me an Oreo filled with toothpaste, and I ate it. This collection puts on to the page stories very familiar to immigrants: what it is like to be seen, to be heard. “Things are slowly changing,” Chang argues. The narratives are no longer, across the board, about pain. “We’re creating new forms of currency in which our joy is as valuable as our suffering.”

That this is a published book, not an online collection, is a telling decision. These are the sorts of essays you might typically read on a website: they feel urgent and current, and the business of book publishing takes an age in comparison. But you also may not have encountered certain essays if they weren’t on the type of websites you read, beckoning from a side column, or shared on a Facebook friend’s page, or Tweeted by a personality you follow. There is no question that the internet plays a big role in segregation, whether imposed or self-imposed: that these stories are collected together in this form becomes newly valuable.

I wondered, at times, who The Good Immigrant USA is for. The introduction says: “We wanted to humanise immigrants, let them tell their own stories and finally be in charge of their own narrative.” For Chang, her readers are fellow immigrants: “We lost the election,” she writes, with that assumption. Others assume a more wide-ranging audience, but who knows who this book will find? The editors are engagingly optimistic.

“Knowledge, in the days before instantaneous electronic recall,” Cole writes here, “was full of potential energy. It was attended by a guesswork that fostered a different way of knowing, one that allowed for ranges rather than insisting on points.” Lately, we look for the points. This book does what books can do better than other media: it devotes space to the shadowy ranges, to the subjects that are not easily graspable – the ineffable, varied, certainly never simple experiences of being an immigrant. Alexander Chee’s essay, Your Father’s County, is an exemplar of this, thriving in its ambivalence about Korea, his father’s country, and America, which is his. It allows for the fact that we can be happy in the US, and unhappy too – at home, and not. Writing of Korea, Chee writes: “I knew I would die here if I had to, and it would be a happy death, because it was born from that same shock of belonging, some deepening of the earlier one. As the plane returned me to America, I knew I would die here because I wanted to live here. That these were the same feeling.”

• Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin is published by Scribner. The Good Immigrant USA is published by Dialogue (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.