Sublime

There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting. When I do not feel like I’m pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here. It is almost a second language, and one that I take pride in, though I wish I did not need to be so fluent in it.

Over a decade ago, I sat silently in an MFA workshop while mostly white writers discussed my race. I had decided not to name the race of any character, Asian American or otherwise—but the workshop demanded that the story inform “the reader” if my characters were like me, people of color.

As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path.

creator of the Smithsonian Museum’s “Programs in Black Culture,” and one of the leading authorities on Black American music culture,

I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white studen