As fearsome as Covid-19 is, it is not the Nazis.
The French, whose fascination with 19th-century Japanese painting and decorative art led them to coin the term 'Japonisme,' have reciprocated the interest, and the exchange - in food, fashion and design - is ongoing. After all, these are two countries where style is considered essential to life.
I consciously learned and performed my race like a teacher's pet in an advanced placement course on black masculinity.
The problem of racial difference in America - and in modern life more broadly - is always presented as an economic, political, biological or cultural problem. But I want to say that it's at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster.
People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences.
If the idea of separate human races is a mistake to begin with, then monoracial forms of identification are fictitious and counterproductive.
A fatherless boy raised in Jim Crow Texas, my dad was a tenacious autodidact, the first in his family to get a college degree.
There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we're really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste.
Like my father, I used to believe that hard work and mastery of a standardized exam was the fairest way for students like me to compete with those who had far more resources.
Between my freshman and senior years of high school in the late '90s, my father spent his evenings, weekends and vacations drilling my best friend and me for our SATs.
Intellectual development was paramount to my father, of course, but he was hardly a geek. He was a man who happened to be of a certain Southern culture and a certain age, and his talents and tastes had been molded accordingly.
Yet exactly what constitutes privilege and disadvantage can be counterintuitive: There is no metric to take into account the casual racism that I had to navigate in my neighborhood, a difficulty I was keenly aware friends of mine on the more socially cohesive and nurturing black side of town were often able to avoid.
A powerful way to sidestep America's reluctance to become postracial would be for more black Americans to become postnational.
Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.
When I published my first book, a memoir, the experience taught me that writing something of any significant length was an endurance sport as much as anything else.
I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.
Doubtless, reading good books benefited me during the months and years of writing, yet I remained skeptical of any tight correlation to what I produced. That was naive.
A map of Trump country would look a lot like a map of the various regions and counties from which young people with the best opportunities have consistently chosen to flee.
