Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

by Jose Antonio Vargas

to do with what was right. White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness—how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal—hurts not only people of color who aren’t white but also white people who can’t carry the burden of what they’ve constructed. The Bluest Eye, I would learn, was Morrison’s first book. Often, her books, from Sula to Song of Solomon to Beloved, were not displayed alongside books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or writers who make up the canon of American literature taught at schools. Too often, while searching for her work, I was directed to the African American sections of bookstores. Searching for Morrison led me to discover the work of black poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar, to the writings of black writers like Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin. I cite their race because it’s a crucial element of their power. Black writers gave me permission to question America. Black writers challenged me to find my place here and created a space for me to claim. Reading black writers opened doors to other writers of color, specifically Asian and Latino authors (Carlos Bulosan, Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, to name just a few) whose work was often even more marginalized than that of black writers. Indeed, if Morrison provoked me to ask more penetrating questions—to insist on the “how” and the “why”—Baldwin c...