I remember particularly a student’s comment in the remedial class on the return of the daughter from the foster home to the care of her indigent mother in Tilly Olson’s “I Stand Here Ironing,” a text some of you would know, much anthologized and much taught. “It reminds me of my brother coming back from prison,” said this laid-back Puerto Rican student. There was an embarrassed silence. The comment was coded as unsettling for the young East Asian female teacher who had clearly been put there because she, too, was hyphenated. The fact that she was incontrovertibly upper class had, of course, not been noticed. Race was all that mattered, and not even “race,” whatever that might be in the abstract, but rather hyphenation with America – that selfsame white light to produce a magical empathy because you are all immigrants. So the student makes this remark. I remained silent, of course. It was not my class. The young man had caught Olson’s spirit that the organizational indifference of the welfare state separating the child from the mother can make any institution an imprisonment. He had earned the right to rewrite Tilley Olson’s story in his own idiom, offering the same critique of governmentality in however illiterate a form. Here, I do differ some from Ms. Sontag. I don’t just think writers are readers. I think good readers reading transformatively earn the right to rewrite the text in its idiom, a Freud reading Hamlet. But the moment could not be acknowledged. The teacher proceeded to an academically approved close and ended the reading with a feminist account of mothering.

I witnessed many such missed encounters in my experience going from remedial reading class to remedial reading class all over New York. There is no guarantee that such flexibility of the imagination in the underclass as instrument of survival would survive gentrification. This is another thing that we need to realize when so-called national origins claim authenticity to avoid doing homework, and I speak as one of them. I speak as one of them. I am totally combative against white racism, but that’s also not a good way to go. My Columbia classroom is full of gentrified diasporics. They are, of course, abundantly literate in the minimum sense of the term, but neither cultural instruction nor institutional tradition prepares them for that painstaking and caring practice where the reader reads others’ writings with respect and patience as if to earn the right to rewrite the text in the spirit of its writing. This is a simple sentence but it is difficult to understand. The fact of making your sentences simpler doesn’t mean that you become easier to understand. This is a scary lesson.