Mea Culpa in Writing Race

I've made plenty of missteps as I journey along with the rest of my author friends to include and describe characters of different races, but I featured a particular error in my article for School Library Journal:

Overexoticizing a nonwhite character to appeal to white readers can happen inside a story as well as on a cover. Take my book The Sunita Experiment (Little, Brown, 1993), the story of an eighth grader whose California home becomes much more traditional when her grandparents visit from I