there is a woman in this book, fannie hurst, who i judge pretty harshly. fannie hurst, as far as i'm concerned, went into harlem to take and take and take and take, did not give back and paid, essentially, no price for everything she got and appropriated from black culture. but the reason to hold back the judgment question until the very, very, very bitter end is that i think we are still struggling with the question of when does empathy and understanding bleed into appropriation and theft and vice versa. as a literary scholar, the thing that most excites me is when i see my students genuinely learn to identify across cultural historical gender, sexual, racial difference with characters really unlike themselves. this is the great moment for any literature teacher. this is like, yes, you know? even more important than theory, this moment of identification. at the same time, we cringe at appropriations. we, and we have been cringing so carefully at appropriation that we have not been encouraging a great deal of cross-lines a allegiance and identification. fo