Write your biography about being a confused half-black, half-white, three-quarters Hawaiian, one-eight Indonesian, six-fourths Chicagoan, nine-thirtieths Cherokee and four-fifths Jim Beam teenager looking to sort out a confusing identity. If you can’t be bothered to write it, outsource the project to a Caucasian radical terrorist, who, like you, comes from a wealthy family. If that one sells, write another one.
It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, it shows that you are an outsider. Who but an outsider would write an entire book dealing with one’s own “outsiderness”? Everyone feels like an outsider sometimes, and your outsider status will be proof that you can relate to all the actual outsiders who don’t feel like they are represented in a government run by Harvard graduates with paper degrees and iron decrees.
A splintered nation, a divided land, is a land of outsiders. The more that the outsiders play their game of Divide-and-Conquer, the more people look for outsiders to represent them. The more that they are told that America is illegitimate because it is a nation of insiders, the more willing they are to prove the charge wrong by electing an outsider. An outsider who’s exactly like the insiders, only worse.
It’s hard out there for an outsider and in a nation run by insiders who pretend to be outsiders, we are all outsiders.
