The problem with this type of reading is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged—by well-meaning teachers and lazy publishing copy—to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things; which is to say, as a supplement for their empathy muscles, a metabolic exchange that turns writers of color into little more than ethnographers—personal trainers, to continue the metaphor. The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.
