The accommodatingly neutral way Didion makes space for the teacher’s neocolonial racism—“I accepted it in the spirit it was offered,” as the woman literally grabs a Chinese girl’s arm and shows her off like a vase—passes just under the wire for what might constitute journalistic neutrality, but is also akin to those taxing moments when white people, always in a demonstration of their vaunted rationality and open-mindedness, try to tell you, very objectively, all about someone else’s racism, the better to deflect from any scrutiny of their own.
