Thank you, Cate.  I appreciate that and I really like your blog.

I do want to say, though, that while I'm coming down on the side of "empathy" and taking the plunge, I do think we need to listen closely to people who feel we're overstepping.  Sometimes, they are just taking out old hurts on us but a lot of the time, it means we didn't do a good enough job.  Though I have to say, I never heard that critique of Hurricane.

The other thing about a situation like that is that I'm pretty sure Ruben Hurricane Carter gave Jewison permission to do the film.  He could have picked a Black director if he preferred that perspective.  People also criticized Alice Walker for choosing Spielberg to direct The Color Purple (of course, people criticized a ton of stuff about The Color Purple) but she had good reasons why she chose him.  She wanted what he could do.  That's more or less what I am claiming - that the people who asked me to tell their stories gave me permission to tell them in the way that felt right to me.  But that is not a carte blanche to tell it any way I want. If I distort or misuse someone's story, that's on me.

Thanks for having this discussion with me, it's really helping me to figure out what I want to say about why I write in the way that I do.