The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

by Nikesh Shukla

There’s an essay by Saeed Jones called “Portrait of the Artist as an Ungrateful Black Writer” that has been on my mind since it first came out in 2015. In it Saeed writes about the nauseating balance between feeling desperately grateful to be allowed into the proverbial room and feeling resentful that his gratefulness is expected.

James Baldwin’s observation, “I walk into a room and everyone there is terribly proud of himself because I managed to get to the room.”

Naming things really makes a difference. I thought about microaggressions all the time before I had a name for the phenomenon. Once I did, once they could be reliably tagged, they also felt like something that could be dealt with effectively. “Mansplaining.” “Rape culture.” All of those terms help clarify the intention of an act or a situation, and that’s the kind of explaining I can get behind. But refusing to name a thing carries its own form of power.