What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.
In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does.
For me I was always a smart nerdy kid. I wasn't the smartest and I wasn't the nerdiest, but I was a smart nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I definitely wanted to be somehow involved with reading the rest of my life, and I came from a community, I lived in a community, I was part of a community where reading was considered completely alien.
I'm really into the rights of immigrants, the rights of the working poor. I'm one of those little activist types. I probably would have just gone to law school. And the scary part is that I was one of those kids who always tested really well. You put a test in front of me, and I would have been like do-do-do-do-do. I probably would have been some community lawyer somewhere - if anything, that's probably what I would have been doing.
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