The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
She’s also a woman who works in a male-dominated industry, which comes with its own specific pitfalls. To be a woman is to be less than; other women avoid her. “It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch,” she thinks. She struggles with how the public defines her: not through her accomplishments, but through her relationships with men.
charming, good-looking, and normal. Both of them agree that he’s kind of shallow, boring, and a little dumb, until it’s almost too late. As Sadie muses ruefully, life is long, unless it isn’t. Like a save point mid-game, we all get redos—another tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, to fix everything. We all will have only one day where we don’t.