Who Gets to Write What? – NY Times

By KAITLYN GREENIDGE

September 24, 2016

When I was in graduate school, I remember a fellow writer bringing to a workshop a lynching scene. The writer was not black. He was, in fact, a Chinese-American man named Bill Cheng, who would go on to write a novel of the blues called “Southern Cross the Dog.”

In class that day, we hemmed and hawed over discussing the scene until our professor slammed the table and shouted at the room, “Does Bill have the right to write this scene?”

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