The First Draft: Rights in the Book

I didn't set out to write a book about racism at all, but I happened to be writing the book The First Draft in 2020. In October that year Senator Erica Betz got up in front of a Senate committee hearing and sort of singled out the three Chinese people in attendance for asking them to denounce the Communist Party. And so that was a real moment for me because I felt like that was almost a bit nightmarish in that you could maybe- are we moving towards a world in which you could assume that someone is like an enemy of the state just because they look Chinese, unless they specifically prove themselves otherwise? But even as I was writing it was very hesitant to write about