The Perils of Privilege centers around an ambitious young Black advertising professional whose long-awaited career breakthrough comes with unexpected strings attached. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?

The novel did not begin with a single incident so much as with a long accumulation of questions—questions shaped by my own life as an African American, by years of teaching and writing about African American culture and literature, and by the conversations I have had in elite American universities about race, language, and belonging.

As a professor, I have often returned to the language we use to describe racial discrimination. For many years, words such as racism and prejudice carried the weight of that discussion. They named exclusion, hostility, and abuse of people of color; they also suggested, in many cases, conscious intent. But when the word privilege began to circulate more widely to name essentially the same kind of behaviors, I found myself drawn to it because it seemed to name something more elusive.

Privilege, as I began to think about it, did not simply describe open hostility or deliberate acts of discrimination. It pointed instead to the quieter and often unacknowledged ways racial advantage moves through institutions, relationships, and everyday assumptions. It made visible a form of harm that can be produced not only by what people intend, but also by what they fail to question.

That tension became the emotional and intellectual center of the novel. I was especially interested in what happens to African Americans who believe that education, discipline, and achievement will protect them from racial bias, only to discover that those protections are partial and fragile. Through fiction, I wanted to examine how privilege operates not as an abstract concept, but as a lived reality—shaping ambition, opportunity, self-understanding, and the relationships people form with one another. The novel grew out of that desire to dramatize the unseen forces that influence our choices, and to ask what happens when well-intentioned people become participants in systems they have not fully learned to see.

What misconceptions about privilege were you hoping to challenge?

In The Perils of Privilege, I wanted to trouble the easy assumption that privilege is a kind of shelter—something that fully and permanently protects all people from the harsher weather of American life.

Privilege can open doors, soften certain blows, and create the illusion of safety, but the novel asks what happens when that safety proves conditional, fragile, or incomplete.

Damon, an African American, enters the world believing, as many Americans are taught, that achievement can serve as a shield. He has the markers of success: a middle-class upbringing, an Ivy League education, and the promise of a professional future. Those accomplishments give him confidence, but they also leave him vulnerable to a particular kind of disillusionment. In the White-owned advertising firm where he works, Damon discovers that accomplishment does not release him from the meanings others attach to his race. The contradiction at the heart of his life is that he has done everything he was told would matter, only to learn that it does not matter in the same way for everyone.

I was also interested in the quiet danger of privilege within Black life itself. Relative advantage can nurture ambition and self-possession, but it can also distance a person from realities they have not yet been forced to confront. For Damon, privilege does not make racism disappear; instead, it delays his reckoning with it. When that reckoning arrives, it is not only social or professional—it is deeply interior, unsettling the story he has told himself about who he is and how the world works.

In that sense, the novel is less interested in condemning privilege than in revealing its limits. I wanted to create characters—Black and White—who move through the world with assumptions they do not fully examine, and who must eventually face the consequences of that blindness. Privilege, in the novel, becomes perilous not simply because it exists, but because it can persuade people that they understand more than they do, and that they are safer than they are.

Many of the book’s biggest moments come through conversation rather than action. What appeals to you about dialogue-driven storytelling?

I will begin by saying that, as a writer, I do not find “dialogue-driven storytelling” any more appealing than other ways of telling a story. I approach each of my novels with the intention of finding the most effective way to present the story I want to tell. For that reason, I do not tend to separate conversation from action too sharply. For me, conversation is itself a form of action: it can reveal motives, shift power, expose conflict, and alter the direction of a story. In some cases, dialogue is not a substitute for action but the most precise way for action to occur.

While I do not necessarily agree with the assertion that “the book’s biggest moments come through conversation rather than action,” I agree that dialogue plays an important role in telling Damon’s story. What appealed to me about dialogue in this novel is its ability to reveal character and relationships while allowing the story to unfold through people’s interactions. In many of my stories, what characters say—and, just as importantly, what they choose not to say—can expose assumptions, prejudices, fears, aspirations, and conflicts that might otherwise require extensive narration to explain. Conversation also allows readers to experience those discoveries as they happen rather than simply being told about them afterward.

This is particularly important when writing about African American life and culture, where much of the experience is embedded in how people understand, negotiate, and talk about the world around them. A conversation can reveal differences in generational experience, social position, racial consciousness, or personal circumstances without my having to explicitly explain them to the reader.

So, while I would not describe myself as a “dialogue-driven” writer, I do value dialogue as one of the most effective tools available to a novelist. When it serves the story, conversation can carry enormous dramatic weight, especially in a novel involving traumatic events. A few people sitting and talking can sometimes produce more consequential change than an elaborate physical action because, by the end of the conversation, someone may see themselves, another person, or the world around them differently. For me, the question is not whether a story should be driven by dialogue or action, but which form of action best serves the story I am trying to tell.

What do you hope readers are still thinking about a week after finishing The Perils of Privilege? 

I hope readers are still thinking about the word privilege itself—how easily it is used, how fiercely it is resisted, and how complicated it becomes when we are asked to locate it in our own lives. One of the questions at the heart of The Perils of Privilege is not simply who has privilege and who does not, but what privilege allows us to see, what it allows us to ignore, and what it may cost us not to examine it honestly.

A week after finishing the novel, I would like readers to be unsettled in a productive way. I want them to think about the privileges they may benefit from—racial, economic, educational, social, professional—and also about the ways they may have been harmed by the unexamined privileges of others. Those two realities often exist side by side. A person can be wounded in one context and advantaged in another; they can understand exclusion deeply and still fail to recognize the doors that have opened for them. That tension interests me because it resists easy moral categories.

I also hope readers are left thinking about responsibility. The novel is concerned with the perils of being privileged, but it is equally concerned with the pitfalls of living in the path of someone else’s privilege. Privilege becomes dangerous when it is mistaken for innocence, merit, or immunity from consequence. It can distort relationships, cloud judgment, and make people complicit in harm they do not intend to cause. If readers find themselves asking, Where have I been protected? Where have I been blind? Where have I made assumptions about someone else’s life?, then the novel has continued to do its work beyond the final page.

Ultimately, I do not want readers to leave the book with a single conclusion so much as with a sharper set of questions. Fiction gives us the opportunity to inhabit complexity without rushing to resolve it. My hope is that The Perils of Privilege stays with readers as an invitation to examine the stories they tell themselves about fairness, success, injury, and accountability—and to consider how those stories shape the way they move through the world.

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