“The first impulse is to go, oh man, are you supposed to be writing about that, as a white American?” he said. “We tend to think of racism and slavery as something that’s appropriate only for black artists to engage with, and there’s something troubling and perverse about that.”
In a new novel, white author Ben H. Winters writes of an America in which the Civil War never happened, and slavery is still legal in four states. The book, titled Underground Airlines, centers around a black bounty hunter who used to be a slave himself.
