"This story is not about a tragic childhood. It is not about mean adults or about how difficult it was growing up in the Harlem of the 1980s. This story is a response to a number of recent stories that go slumming through other people’s misery, a response to privileged authors who want to imagine themselves as saviors of the less fortunate, to those who don’t recognize their own power when they write about racial “others.” The adults in my life knew this othering game all too well and they did everything they could to protect me from it. This is a story about being inside of outside. Cowbirders, when the look at “outsiders” only reaffirms your own inside status, it's time to rethink what you mean by "outside.""
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