“As long as you think you’re White,” James Baldwin once said, “I’m going to be forced to think I’m Black.” So where do non-Black, non-White people fit in that foundational binary? How do we talk about anti-Blackness in Asian and Latinx households, millions of which are immigrant families? Can we stop describing America as a nation of immigrants because it erases the fundamental fact that Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved peoples are *not* immigrants, and neither are Native Americans? How can we better understand our past and present history so that, in seeing ourselves, we realize how connected we are to each other? I’m all about asking questions, and these are the questions I’ll explore in my new book. As someone who prays to the altar of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, I’m honored to be edited by the legendary Erroll McDonald, who edited Baldwin and Morrison. And I am absolutely thrilled to have the pathbreaking @likaluca as my publisher. From the @latimes (click on the link in bio for full article): “White Is Not a Country” is the first book approved by Lisa Lucas, the new publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, imprints of Penguin Random House. Lucas was previously the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which hands out the prestigious National Book Awards. She announced in June that she was stepping down to join the book publisher after serving the foundation for nearly five years; she is the first Black woman in both roles. Vargas and his agent sent the book proposal to dozens of publishers just hours before the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, when a white mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. They met with 13 publishers, but it was Vargas’ meeting with Lucas and Erroll McDonald, the executive editor of PRH’s Knopf Doubleday division, that sealed the deal. McDonald will edit the book. “My first impression [reading the proposal] was: ‘Every publisher worth its salt is going to be interested in this, but I’m doing this book,’” McDonald said in an email. The esteemed editor has published some of America’s most influential writers and thinkers, including Morrison, James Baldwin and Salman Rushdie.”