I knew that I wanted to write from the point of view of a Black nurse, a skinhead father, and a public defender—a woman who, like me, and like many of my readers, was a well-intentioned white lady who would never consider herself to be a racist. Suddenly I knew that I could, and would, finish this novel. Unlike my first, aborted foray, I wasn’t writing it to tell people of color what their own lives were like. I was writing to my own community—white people—who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he’s a racist…but who can’t recognize racism in themselves.
