Elise Hu

So I do, into school, to the only black teacher I'll have until college, the only black teacher I've had to that point, the only black teacher to teach at that school full of white people who, tell the truth, I love.

The teacher I love, whose name I love, whose hair I love, takes me in the teacher's bathroom and wordlessly fixes my hair, perfectly wordlessly fixes my hair into three tight plaits.

Thank you.

The emotion in that poem is so universal and yet so personal.

How do you create that kind of connectivity between the personal and the universal?

You know, in general, I mean, my quick answer is that art that speaks to any of us always comes from a very particular place.

And then we find ourselves in it in some kind of way.

You know, this is fifth grade when we're 10 years old.

We do and don't experience ourselves as people with races, in raced bodies, to use the theoretical language, you know.

I always knew I was a black person, but I did not think about it 24 hours a day.

I don't think any of us thinks of our race 24 hours a day.

You know, Zora Neale Hurston famously and beautifully said, I feel most black when I am thrown against a stark white background.

So sometimes understanding us as people with races is a relative thing.

So I think that everybody, not just people of color, have in them a lot of really interesting, perhaps unplumbed experiences of understanding yourself in an identity and in a racial identity.

You went to Boston University to get your master's degree at the urging of Adele Alexander, your mother.

Yes.

Can you tell us why?

So I was working as a journalist beforehand.

I was a newspaper gal.

Washington Post.