Summary

In her first essay, Gay writes about the importance of finding a community that represents her. She complains of a lack of diversity in the entertainment industry which offers little for minorities to relate to. As a black woman, Gay learned that she had to work “three times harder than the white kids to get half the consideration” (9). When a classmate in graduate school called her the “affirmative-action student,” she worked twice as hard to be considered deserving of her position. Now, as a professor, she is still haunted by that fear and looking for the community where she fits in. She writes of wanting a mathematical algorithm to give her "a neat way of understanding a problem too complex for the human mind to solve" (14).

In the next essay, Gay remembers visiting Haiti as a child and learning about what true...