I am the wrong kind of Black professor

A few weeks ago, Richard North Patterson — a writer of bestselling courtroom thrillers — published an article in The Wall Street Journal explaining the kerfuffle surrounding one of his forthcoming novels, “Trial.” The controversy is straightforward: Patterson, who is an old white man, had the audacity to write a novel about a young Black man. Patterson’s article details how his work was rejected by 20 publishers, who said the book was inappropriate not because it treated race in an offensive way or evinced poor research of its subject matter but simply because he did not share the lived experience of his characters.

As a moonbat leftist, I am not typically in the business of reading The Wall Street Journal. Nor am I an aficionado of contemporary courtroom dramas. But when a family member forwarded Patterson’s article about the resistance he encountered trying to write about a race other than his own, it hit close to home: I am a Black professor who is an expert on 19th- and 20th-century British literature — the infamous “dead white men” of European art and letters. Like Patterson, I have often been criticized for not staying in my racial lane. In fact, throughout my academic life I’ve had to justify my intellectual interests and fight the assertion that I should spend my time researching authors who share my skin color. For as long as I can remember, it has been made clear to me that I am the wrong kind of Black academic.