 When I was in the eighth grade, Randall Dunn came into the morning assembly where all the boys congregated and told us a sad story. Randall Dunn was the first black head monitor student body president in the 200-year history of our school. He was a three-sport varsity athlete, fantastic grades, awesome dude. Everybody loved him, including the admissions department at Brown. But when he was in the dorm the night before, one of the white boys had said to him, well, we know that you're head monitor and all this stuff. But really the reason why you got into Brown is because you're black. Sociologists call this sort of thing a microaggression. When a white person says intended or unintended to a black person, what ultimately means you are of lesser value, lesser worth, lesser intelligence. This isn't exactly as bad as someone sticking a gun in your face because you're wearing a hoodie, but ultimately the experience undergirding both of those forms of racism is the same, the idea that the black mind and the black body are lesser. And these sort of things happen all the time. I was at a writer's retreat in Italy, this Auguste thing that you had to apply to get into. And then Helen Vendler came, Harvard poetry professor. The other professors there told me she was kind of rude. So I wasn't totally surprised when the first time we were alone to talk, the second question out of her mouth was, how did you get here? And what she was saying, thank you, what she was saying was, I don't understand how a young black person could qualify to be at the same writer's retreat as me. So can you please explain it to me? I want to see your resume. And if I had explained it to her, that would have tacitly suggested, well, you have the right to ask me to see my resume and you don't, Helen Vendler. So when she said, how did you get here? I said, by plane. But we know that these sorts of ideas are in people's minds all the time, even if they're not verbalized. Elizabeth Alexander, who read an original poem at Barack Obama's inauguration and is a Yale poetry professor, told me that she knows as she moves throughout the world, people are constantly underestimating her intelligence. She can feel it, she sees it, she knows it. And a lot of us experience this. So what do we do? Well, there's three things that we can do to deal with this. First, we have to remember that race is a social construct. There is no biological difference between the black mind and the white mind. Science rejects the concept of race. And more than that, the mind, we each have an equal ability to build and grow the mind throughout our lives. So when we travel, when we think deeply, when we read, when we write, we are building our mind and we all have the ability to grow our minds as long as we're on the earth. The second thing we can do, when we encounter a situation where there aren't that many people who look like us, we can look for existence-proof role models. People who went before us who succeeded. So you're not wearing the entire race on your shoulders as you're trying to get through something, you're dealing with the difficult part of the learning curve that everybody would encounter. No, others have succeeded before me. I know I can get through this. One thing that we have to do is maintain a private view of ourselves as brilliant and beautiful and badass. And that functions as a sort of mental armor to protect us. So when people say, hey, you didn't deserve to get into brown. You don't deserve to be at my writer's retreat. You already have this armor protecting you saying, no, I know you're wrong. I know my worth and my value. I saw an interesting example of this once when I went to Kanye West's house. He was working on his, he was promoting his first album. I was writing about him for Rolling Stone and I went into his house and there's this gigantic poster of Kanye on the wall. I said, dude, why is there a gigantic poster of you on the wall in your house? And he says, hey, I have to cheer for me before anyone else can cheer for me. I said, that's pretty good. It's indicative of the ego maniacal Kanye we would get later on, but it's still instructive. There's a lesson there for all of us. Don't go home and put a poster of yourself on the wall. That's tacky. But do make sure that there's a poster of yourself on the wall in your mind. Thank you.