At some point early on I must have understood that all the great writers whom I so loved, all those white Europeans whose works I revered and hoped to emulate, I must have understood that they—either for reasons of my class, or gender, or mixed race, or for being a crass, shallow American—would have looked down on me. But I can’t remember this ever mattering to me. Now, in our brave new cultural world, I keep being told that it’s the only thing that should matter to me.
Right on.
