Belonging to a racial minority conferred moral authority that no one must be allowed to counterfeit or compromise. Once we understand that, we can hazard a guess at why Seltzer decided to write as a minority gang member in the first place. She was doing the same thing that immigrants had done a century before when they changed their names from Svensson to Swanson or from Bellini to Bell. She was bartering away a bit of her identity in exchange for moral authority and belonging. She was concealing, as best she could, her membership in a low-prestige ethnic group in order that she might
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