In Defense of Junot Diaz's Critique of MFA Programs

By this point, most of us have already read part or all of Junot Diaz's critique of MFA programs in the New Yorker as being oversaturated with white faculty and white writers.  If somehow you've been hiding in a capsule hotel with a nasty case of Malaria so you haven't been able to catch up on the world, you can check it out here:
 

Are MFA programs too white? Junot Díaz reflects on his experience: http://t.co/ebVcYqyM2u
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 4, 2014

Anyway, Junot Diaz doesn't need me to defend him in any way, but I do have a few things to add to this discourse concerning the role (and also the constraints) of race in workshop.  Here are my thoughts:

1.  Most of the pissed-off comments on the New Yorker website are by white educated readers, which proves the very point Junot Diaz was making about our cultural inability to tolerate, moreover, accept race as both a construct and also a cultural and literary reality for writers of color.  In fact, the response of most of the posters mirrors the response of many writers I knew in my own MFA workshops concerning race, who either saw race as an ideological and thematic obsession for writers of color that made their writing polemical somehow (because writing about being white is never polemical), an impediment to some imaginary "pure" prose school that was supposed to focus on the universality of human beings and not their particularities, or a direct challenge to literary realism that has been dominated by white, upper-class, heteronormative, East Coast writers for so long now that the"white" narrative has become a synonym for "neutral," "standard" and "uncontroversial."  In fact, whiteness is still part of the literary default settings:  if an author doesn't specify the race of a character, most readers still assume s/he's white unless there's a stereotypical race marker.

2.  One thing most commenters failed to understand about MFA programs is that they don't share the same theoretical training or theory-obsessed culture as the English PhD programs that MFA programs are usually part of.  For example, critical PhD students rarely enroll in MFA workshops because of enrollment caps in workshops and many MFA students avoid literary theory classes whenever possible.  What this means is, it's very possible (and also very normal for MFA students) to avoid any and all conversations intersecting with minority discourse, postcolonialism, queer theory, marxist theory at all.  The point is, most MFA programs are dead spaces for the examination of racial discourse and the analysis of non-white cultural/racial narratives.  In fact, in most MFA programs not located in Oakland, California, race becomes a venereal disease that no one wants to talk about.  They don't even wanna touch it.

3.  As a hapa who reads white but is actually part Asian (Japanese) and part white (French and British), I'm actually on both sides of this dynamic.  And I have to say that I mostly agree with Junot.  I encountered a shitload of resistance when I wrote about non-white characters during my MFA years in part because of the assumptions that other writers made about my own race (which filtered what they believed I was allowed to write about and what I wasn't).  I remember in one piece I submitted to workshop, I had a desi character who I was very fond of.  For a draft, I found her to be smart, independent, complex, and intriguing.  But the workshop completely rejected her characterization, not because they found her to be an Indian stereotype (for this would assume familiarity with Indian culture), but because they didn't understand why I had an Indian character in my manuscript at all.  One white student even suggested that I put an Indian character to spice up my chapter.  That's a verbatim quote, by the way.  And when even one of my Pakistani writer friends (another desi!) in workshop vouched for both the cultural authenticity and also the uniqueness of her character, the workshop rejected his comments and then spoke over him.  Think about that for a second:  a group of mostly white writers telling a hapa writer and a Pakistani writer what was culturally authentic and culturally permissible in workshop about non-white people.  The reality is that having mostly white writers and mostly white faculty can create a hostile MFA atmosphere in which people either deny that race exists at all (either in the world or on the page), they treat race as if it were some cultural crusade to punish white people or they assume that race in fiction and in workshop is always an act of tokenism, shallowness, political correctness, white guilt or even more paradoxically, of racism.  Even worse, many white writers and faculty treat race, the issue of race and racism and racial constructions like a didactic exercise that writers bring into workshop in order to teach the workshop something, as opposed to simply being a reflection of non-white reality.  There must be a reason why there are non-white characters in this short story, they say inside their minds.

4.  Of course, writers in workshop should call out racist, hackneyed or shallow characterizations of characters of whatever race, but this shouldn't create a culture of fear or intolerance in which either people are too afraid to talk about race and racism or deal with race or racism in their own writing, or where writers are denying the cultural vocabulary of writers of color (or characters of color).  And yet, I saw this shit all the time in my MFA where white writers were the most intolerant to the topic and the examination of alternative racial realities in writing.  And the thing is, there were more than a few writers of color in my MFA (desi, Asian American, Latino), but none of them ever contributed to the discussion of race in class whatsoever.  In fact, most ran away from the topic at all, maybe because they didn't want to get dragged into the cesspool of race, derail the workshop flow or maybe they didn't share any "radical" views about race at all.  Or maybe they believed that art was about people, not race, and so they sympathized with the subtle white persecution of race in workshop.  Either way, and this is precisely where I partially disagree with Junot Diaz, even the inclusion of more writers of color in workshop doesn't necessarily dismantle the structure of white supremacy that operates silently sometimes inside workshop.  Especially if those writers of color have been trained (brainwashed) to believe that literary merit, not the translation of literary merit through the lens of class, race, gender, etc., etc., should be the sole criterion of workshop analysis.

-To read more about my thoughts about the construction of race in writing, workshop politics for writers of color, and the importance/impossibility of writing non-white cultural narratives, you can go here.

-Additionally, to read more about the ongoing problematic of teaching creative writing workshop as an instructor of color, and also the no-win situation of being a writer of color inside a creative writing workshop, check out Matt Salesses smart piece in NPR, "When Defending Your Writing Means Defending Yourself."

Why Race Still Matters in Fiction (Reprint)

This blog entry is a reprint from 2009.  Somehow, it still feels incredibly relevant culturally to where we are right now in publishing:

Now I have nothing but love for The Missouri Review + I both respect + appreciate that the editors have the decency to write personal responses on their rejection letters when they like a story. That's nothing if not classy + amazing, especially for such a top-notch (if not impenetrable) literary journal. I don't even have beef with the editor that was kind enough to write me a personal response. I wholeheartedly appreciate both the gesture + her point of view. But I do have an issue with her analysis. Here's a copy of the rejection:

If you can't make out the editor's note, it says:

Hello, Your story was interesting, but I felt like you focused too much on G. being white--she's awful, certainly, but I don't see why race matters there. That being said-I loved the focus on words, and how you ended it. Please try us again soon with another piece.

Here's the deal:

While I totally appreciate the feedback + the honesty, the reality is that:

1. This short story is about the intersectionality of race, class + love in Southern California. It even says so in my cover letter

2. The protagonist, E., a smart Chicana girl who doesn't fit in the white or the Hispanic clique, is trying to survive at a high school where rich white girls pretty much dominate. In the end, she falls in love with an exchange student from [], which drives G. (the rich, white girl) insane

3. There's only one line where the narrator overtly mentions race, when she talks about how some rich white girls (especially in HS) hurt people because they can (a statement I still defend, with exceptions). And if race does matter in this story, I think it matters more in the way that being Latina in SoCal can be a huge obstacle to personal advancement. Sure, sure, any self-applied Latino can succeed, but he or she has to work so much harder for it than many white students from wealthy families who don't need to work half as hard. Latinos, remember, are the highest employed minority in the US. But when your parents don't speak English, or they don't speak it well, or they're working 60 hours a week, or when no one in your family has gone to college, that student has enormous obstacles to getting to college + acquiring cultural capital. That's just a reality, not even a complaint really

4. Anyone who's spent time in SoCal--especially in high school--sees the blatant socio-economic rift between Latino + white Americans. It's slowly changing, but the rich/poor gap is still a reality. My story doesn't blame white people because they're white, it shows how malicious an antagonist can be when she has money, influence + power (which, based on this country's history, is more often a white person but doesn't necessarily have to be)

5. Instead of shying away from things that make us uncomfortable (e.g. race, class, racism, gossip, jealousy) my story pretty much goes for it + tries to talk about big subjects. I'm sick of stories of paralysis, sick of stories that don't deal with the big issues, that are basically apolitical, antipolemical, self-centered little works of art that have no relationship with the greater world

6. Even if my story really did focus on race as much as the editorial assistant seemed to imply, which I think would have been totally fine, this story is above all else, a love story between a Chicana girl and an exchange student from [ ], both of whom, use words to not only express their love for each other, but also to empower themselves in a country where English is a sacred rite of passage. Beyond that, this is a revenge story, where the less-than-perfect, precocious Latina takes her revenge on the thin, rich, white, school bully who hates the fact that all of her money + power can't buy the protagonist's boyfriend. The protagonist's revenge--love it or hate it--is the way she stops feeling like a victim

7. At the end of the day, Cornell West is right: race matters.  At least to people that aren't white. Race matters less to white people because they're the majority race (percentage-wise), so when they talk about how we should just focus on merit, talent, skill, intelligence, voice, stuff like that, that's spoken hegemonically: the luxury to focus on our qualities becomes a way of differentiating us when we are racially + culturally the same. But since different people from non-hegemonic races are not only treated differently by white people, but actually perceive reality differently because of this, you can see how complicated all this gets. When a white person says to his black friend: you're so cool dude, I don't even think of you as black. This is a compliment coming from a white person because he's basically saying I see the universal in you, I relate with you, I connect with you + I don't feel like race is getting in the way. But for many people of color, this is racial erasure. It's like someone taking away a unique set of experiences that have shaped you, experiences fundamentally different than those of your white friend, experiences that are often painful, contrary to those of your friends + sometimes distressing too, but experiences that your friend didn't have, experiences that affect you a great deal, even when you're over them.

So, I apologize for this spiel, but I bring this up for one basic reason: when the good-intentioned editor says "I don't see why race matters in this story," the problem is that for many white readers, race has never had to matter, either in life or in a story--but this is white privilege, the privilege of being allowed to ignore your own race, something most people of color I know never get to do.  When you're white + you drive a BMW, you don't get pulled over unless you're speeding.  When you're black + you drive a BMW, you get pulled over just for being black + having a nice car (happens all the time, by the way).  Suddenly, you become very aware of your race.  Same shit walking through a gated community when you're the "wrong" color.  Or when you try to become a member of your local country club.  Or when you're wearing a hoodie in Samford, Florida.

And for me (a hapa who looks white + is treated white/latino all the time), race matters a great deal, not just the part you see (or the part you think you see), but also the part you don't see (ironically, the part that has shaped me the most, the Japanese side, the blue mosaic me). Race has a huge effect on how I see the world + how the world sees me. So, when conservatives argue that cops aren't racist, they're not completely lying from their point of view. They don't see racism because they're white, wealthy + connected, + cops don't harass them, so you can see why they actually believe what they say (of course, some don't want to see it either because that would be a personal indictment of their simplistic cosmology). Ditto with fiction. When minority writers or writers from minority cultures discuss so-called minority issues in their stories that are remotely racial, social or political, white readers + editors want to know why does it have to be about race, gender, orientation, politics? Why can't it just be about people? My answer: it is about people, but people that aren't always white (or straight or male or politically neutral or paralyzed or frivolously dramatic) who are never able to forget who they are, whether they want to or not. Race (like other minority cultural identities) is an everyday reality, not some thematic obsession. This is something that's hard for white readers--even the best of them--to grasp sometimes because they've been brainwashed with the mantra that only talent + artistic merit should be important. But racial erasure can be just as bad as racialization, especially when you tell a writer of color that nothing they've gone through is important.  And yet, stories come from somewhere + that somewhere tends to come out in their stories.

Thoughts on Race, White Despair + 20-Something Readers in Fiction

Here's a small compilation of responses about race, publishing + fiction that I wrote to my readers (most of who were smart, interested, fiction writers themselves) from my former Live Journal blog :
1. It’s easier for someone to step into the narrative arc whose cultural perspective is either similar or compatible with what s/he "knows," or thinks s/he knows. That's really the problem. So, for example, let's say the editor is vaguely liberal, but doesn't have any Indian friends, and he reads a story about an boy from Punjab that wants to be the QB for Arizona State. Some editors will unconsciously reject this premise because it doesn't jive with what they think they know about Indian culture. Others will embrace the premise--all other things being equal--because they're charmed by the novelty. The point is, either way, it affects the biases of the editor, negatively or positively, but what it doesn't do, is fit right in. That's a bizarre privilege actually, to have the dominant cultural perspective to tell your story.

2. When I say white despair, this doesn't mean it doesn't actually exist or that it's homogeneous, or that it shouldn't be written about, it just means that so much solid, technically proficient writing these days comes down to paralysis, drugs, abuse + despair. Of course there's variations, but despair in its umbrella concept has become a hackneyed theme in fiction generally And statistically, that despair is overwhelmingly told from an upper middle class, educated, white perspective, so much so that I know some editors that sigh when they come across another story in that subgenre.

3. When you talk about Black despair or Asian-American despair, that's based on the assumption that we've already reached the cultural saturation point with that narrative where someone can just drop that term and everyone will know what you're talking about (the way they do when you say white despair), and we haven't reached that point yet, minority despair is still on some basic level different, ethnic, non-white, non-traditional, exotic, whatever post-Orientalist word fits, which is why there's so much overcompensation when non-white writers succeed.

4. I probably need an agent in my corner to fight some of these battles, and I'm not knocking an editor's taste because though profoundly subjective, and subject to immense bias, I know this is absolutely normal + I can't think of another process for evaluating manuscripts either. But race + culture, or what we think we know about those two factors, deeply affects how we evaluate manuscripts. We make a series of judgments + analyses based on our own experience with that cultural framework. And most editors think they're the smartest fuckers in the classroom (sometimes they are too), so they're not approaching manuscripts like "I'm looking to learn something." I remember one classmate in one of my workshops telling me that it was absurd to have a black character speaking in ebonics + then making a reference to the Great Gatsby. To me, this isn't inconsistent because I have friends that do shit like that, but to him it was unrealistic: either you were educated, in which case, you sounded educated (read: young sounded white, a perception that still exists in black culture), or you weren't educated, in which case you sounded uneducated (read: non-white). Now my classmate isn't racist at all, but you can see the implication there a mile away. And there are a thousand of them, most of them, unconscious.

5. I do think my manuscripts get rejected for technical reasons, or for reasons of taste. I have no doubt about that either. But it's not absurd at all to wonder when race + culture play a factor in the evaluation of manuscripts, because inevitably they will--albeit unconsciously--even in the example you gave, where maybe an editor says, this is well written, but I don't know what to make of this story, or it's a cultural point of view that I can't relate with, or it's once I don't understand, so I'll reject it but give the author some nice words. In that example, the editor isn't holding the cultural point of view against me, and yet because it's one he's not very familiar with, it's still getting in the way of his evaluation. That's usually all it has to be, and usually that's enough to stain a submission. Really, that's all I'm saying. And you're right, white despair isn't necessarily the common narrative in journals right now (at least not the ones that get published), nor is it homogenous, but it's very very common thematically in stories, and I think it fluctuates in journals. Julianna Baggot was telling me months ago how many stories she gets at FSU each year for their PhD + MFA programs that take place at parties, with lots of drunk, white kids going through their own paralysis + despair.

And even the really good Benjamin Percy stories have lots of white kids beating the shit out of each other, often to feel alive again. What I do see are a lot of very competent workshop stories, most of which don't affect the reader in anyway, and most of these stories are by white writers (which follows vocation trends), and we can take that narrative for granted in a way that's just not possible for non-white narratives right now. That, in a nutshell, is what I'm getting at.

6. As someone who reads manuscripts himself (or least used to), I try to evaluate manuscripts according to their literary merit to the BEST OF MY ABILITY, but I'm blinded by what I know and don't know and by what I think I know and don't know. We all are. And the culture narrative of non-white writers are files in editor's brains, not real life experiences for them, which affects their ability to understand and even engage writing that doesn't feel familiar to them. Many editors pass on stories they just don't "get" for whatever reason, and the point is, when you're talking about class, inevitably you're talking about race since there's a relationship between class, culture, economics and race, and the vast majority of editors tend to be of the same race, class and culture as the writers submitting those stories (i.e. white). It's changing slowly, but that's still the reality. That's why there are organizations like Cave Canem and Vona, to support writers that bring different experiences + different cultural tools to their narrative. So, whether race/culture becomes an advantage for a writer who happens to write in a so-called "exotic" narrative compared to the dominant cultural (and therefore, socioeconomic, racial) paradigm, or whether it becomes an obstacle to being published, ultimately the point is, either way, this affects the way a writer's ability to get his story (read: his cultural narrative) published, read + disseminated.

6.5 Another thing, which sounds argumentative but isn't: the fact is, most white writers don't think race has anything to do with getting published, because the truth is, for them, it doesn't: they're allowed to believe that their manuscripts are being evaluated solely on literary merit alone because they belong to the dominant cultural paradigm where their race ceases to be a factor and literary merit becomes the yardstick, but many times non-white writers don't have that privilege, their class affects their narrative, their narrative sticks out as being non-traditional, and they don't get that privilege of being just artists. It's changing, but that privilege isn't there yet for them. Their race becomes a negative and positive factor. It's like, when you're part of a sea of other writers, most of them, sharing the same socioeconomic + racial background as you, it's easy to feel that the reading of submissions is a technical process, based exclusively on literary merit, judged almost in a vacuum, but that's not it. It's a question of taste, and some editors like narratives they're not familiar with, and others don't, but we read stories contextually, and when that context is less familiar, it affects our analysis of it. But whether the results are good or bad, in neither circumstance will that manuscript be read exclusively as just another story. That's a weird privilege, but one that non-white writers don't have.

7. One of the real problems is this: the average reader for a university-affiliated literary journal is a twenty-something, upper middle class white student, until recently, usually male, with less life experience and more cynicism than a world-weary editor, and what do these fuckers know about almost anything? Most of them have been in school for most of the lives, and race is an abstract entity, a topic in a classroom discussion, but the world isn't a college campus. Not only do many of these readers not know shit about publishing since few are published, but many don't know shit about different cultural perspectives. And these deficiencies will absolutely affect how a manuscript is read. Anyway, that's all I'm saying.

8. In response to your question: yeah, you're probably right. An agent won't even bother with anything except the glossies + the top-tier journals. But, for many writers, they won't get an agent until they've published something in a second (or if they're lucky) first-tier journal, that's the rub. Journals like Nimrod you have to do it all by yourself. But obviously when you're talking about The Paris Review, I honestly think that the odds are absolutely miserable for talented unknown writers. Agents won't guarantee that our shit is accepted, but they clearly make the process easier. I have one friend who accomplished almost all of his big publications after snagging an agent. It's astonishing, but not surprising.

9. I think the question of race + ethnic voices in fiction works both ways in terms of its appeal: some readers will notice your story more because the voice uses a different cultural narrative, but they are also more likely to treat that voice as a construct, or judge the verisimilitude based on much more limited personal experience (e.g. A Chinese person would never say that!). Also, being different with short stories changes the standards. When your story uses a different voice, you have to answer the question why, a question that traditional white narratives never have to answer. No one says, why are you writing about a boy living in the city who parents are getting divorced, but the question will be used ad nauseum when someone submits a story about a black intellectual that likes opera. I promise you, if that story was about a white dude from Princeton, New Jersey, that question would never be asked. Beyond that, our relationship with exotic narratives is superficial: it can't/won't last, especially since so much of it is based on what it is that we don't recognize, so the instant this so-called exotic narrative starts to feel familiar in any way (i.e. there are normal human issues going on), non-traditional narratives lose their exotica. Beyond that, some of the stuff I'm submitting right now isn't the standard traditional narrative (i.e. stories told from the POV of a Chinese-American graffiti artist), and many readers + editors aren't going to "get it," which isn't a type of discrimination exactly, but they will end up rejecting what they don't get, so the end result is the same, and since what we "get" depends on what we think we know, it would take an exceptional editor to accept the stuff I'm submitting right now, and yet, it's what I'm most interested in writing. It's not about being a good writer, it's just that many editors wait--consciously or unconsciously--until a trend has been formed for them to be audacious: when the Latino or the South Asian voice becomes a popular narrative, then suddenly, stories with that voice will start popping up all over the place. But it's not like Desi writers weren't submitting short stories before Jhumpa Lahiri, we just didn't see them.

10. There's way too many 20-something readers who frankly just don't know shit about writing or publishing, and they're the front line of university journals. Meanwhile, many of the editors will publish stories that they can, on some basic level, already recognize, and you can see why this can be a problem for writers using so-called ethnic voices. It's changing, but never fast enough. Culture is always a light year ahead of publishing.

Why Race Still Matters in Fiction

Now I have nothing but love for The Missouri Review + I both respect + appreciate that the editors have the decency to write personal responses on their rejection letters when they like a story. That's nothing if not classy + amazing, especially for such a top-notch (if not impenetrable) literary journal. I don't even have beef with the editor that was kind enough to write me a personal response. I wholeheartedly appreciate both the gesture + her point of view. But I do have an issue with her analysis. Here's a copy of the rejection:



If you can't make out the editor's note, it says:

Hello, Your story was interesting, but I felt like you focused too much on G. being white--she's awful, certainly, but I don't see why race matters there. That being said-I loved the focus on words, and how you ended it. Please try us again soon with another piece.

Here's the deal:

While I totally appreciate the feedback + the honesty, the reality is that:

1. This short story is about race, class + love in Southern California. It even says so in my cover letter

2. The protagonist, E., a smart Chicana girl who doesn't fit in the white or the Hispanic clique, is trying to survive at a high school where rich white girls pretty much dominate. In the end, she falls in love with an exchange student from [], which drives G. (the rich, white girl) insane

3. There's only one line where the narrator overtly mentions race, when she talks about how rich white girls (especially in HS) hurt people because they can (a statement I still defend, with exceptions). And if race does matter in this story, I think it matters more in the way that being Latina in SoCal can be a huge obstacle to personal advancement. Sure, sure, any self-applied Latino can succeed, but he or she has to work so much harder for it than many white students from wealthy families who don't work half as hard. Latinos, remember, are the highest employed minority in the US. But when your parents don't speak English, or they don't speak it well, or they're working 60 hours a week, or when no one in your family has gone to college, that student has enormous obstacles to success. That's just a reality, not even a complaint really

4. Anyone who's spent time in SoCal--especially in high school--sees the blatant socio-economic rift between Latino + White Americans. It's slowly changing, but it's still a reality. My story doesn't blame white people because they're white, it shows how malicious an antagonist can be when she has money, influence + power (which, based on this country's history, is more often a white person but doesn't necessarily have to be)

5. Instead of shying away from things that make us uncomfortable (e.g. race, class, racism, gossip, jealousy) my story pretty much goes for it + tries to talk about big subjects. I'm sick of stories of paralysis, sick of stories that don't deal with the big issues, that are basically apolitical, antipolemical, self-centered little works of art that have no relationship with the greater world

6. Even if my story really did focus on race as much as the editorial assistant seemed to imply, which I think would have been totally fine, this story is above all else, a love story between a Chicana girl and an exchange student from [ ], both of whom, use words to not only express their love for each other, but also to empower themselves in a country where English is a sacred rite of passage. Beyond that, this is a revenge story, where the less-than-perfect, precocious Latina takes her revenge on the thin, rich, white, school bully who hates the fact that all of her money + power can't buy the protagonist's boyfriend. The protagonist's revenge--love it or hate it--is the way she stops feeling like a victim

7. At the end of the day, Cornell West is right: race matters, at least to people that aren't white. Race matters less to white people because they're the majority race (percentage-wise), so when they talk about how we should just focus on merit, talent, skill, intelligence, voice, stuff like that, that's spoken hegemonically: the luxury to focus on our qualities becomes a way of differentiating us when we are racially + culturally the same. But since different people from non-hegemonic races are not only treated differently by white people, but actually perceive reality differently because of this, you can see how complicated all this gets. When a white person says to his black friend: you're so cool dude, I don't even think of you as black. This is a compliment coming from a white person because he's basically saying I see the universal in you, I relate with you, I connect with you + I don't feel like race is getting in the way. But for many people of color, this is racial erasure. It's like someone taking away a unique set of experiences that have shaped you, experiences fundamentally different than those of your white friend, experiences that are often painful, contrary to those of your friends + sometimes distressing too, but experiences that your friend didn't have that affect you a great deal, whether you liked them or not.

So, I apologize for this spiel, but I bring this up for one basic reason: when the good-intentioned editor says "I don't see why race matters in this story," the problem is that for many white readers, race has never had to matter, either in life or in a story--but this is white privilege. But for me (a hoppa who looks white + is treated white/latino all the time), race matters a great deal. Race has a huge effect on how I see the world + how the world sees me. So, when conservatives argue that there's little or no racism, say in the police department, they're not completely lying, at least from their point of view. They don't see racism because they're white, wealthy + connected, + they're not usually affected by it, so you can see why they actually believe what they say (of course, some don't want to see it either because that would be a personal indictment). Ditto with fiction. When minority writers or writers from minority cultures discuss so-called minority issues in their stories that are remotely racial, social or political, white readers + editors want to know why does it have to be about race, gender, orientation, politics? Why can't it just be about people? My answer: it is about people, but people that aren't always white (or straight, or male, or politically neutral) who are never able to forget who they are, whether they want to or not. Race (like other minority cultural identities) is an everyday reality, not some thematic obsession. This is something that's hard for white readers--even the best of them--to grasp sometimes.