“I know that statement doesn’t jibe with the steady stream of bad news and cynicism that we’re fed through television and Twitter. But I was born at a time when women and people of color were systematically, routinely excluded from enormous portions of American life. Today, women and minorities have risen up the ranks in business, and politics, and everywhere else. The shift is . . . astonishing, remarkable, and it’s happened, when you measure it against the scope of human history, in an instant.
