The South

Here is a bonus for those who go around saying that the great majority of whites are 'racists' of some deplorable variety or another. You’ve got a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for inaccuracies, misinterpretations, or any amount of unpleasantness. You don’t have to be right; you just have to be woke. The media will report and gravely acknowledge your grievances, historic or newly found. What target of your righteous indignation is likely to look you hard in the eye and say, 'You don’t know what you’re talking about?' It happens, just not often enough. Which is what gives an ongoing row at the University of Texas, in Austin, its freshness, not to mention its role in showing us all how to take down by several notches the careless accuser, the racial self-promoter.

In late March I left New York, fleeing the mayor more than the virus. Sunlight being the best disinfectant and I having parents to see, I grabbed a tube of disinfecting wipes and flew to Palm Beach, Florida. After seven weeks of sunny inanition, I prepared to leave and return home. Among my objectives was the fulfillment of a request by a New York friend to pick up a carton of cigarettes for him at Florida prices. Though not a smoker, I sympathize with the tax-burdened as a rule. Entering the Palm Beach Publix supermarket, surely the only Publix with valet parking, I made straight for the tobacco counter, having been advised by my nicotine-addict friend that the store was known to carry his off-piste brand, Carlton 100s.

On a cold and unremarkable November night about 10 years ago, I arrived from India in Knoxville, Tennessee. The first thing I noticed about my new home was its massive front porch.Long and unfussy, it stretched along the entire width of the red-brick Craftsman bungalow. It had an old wooden floor and on one side furniture half-swallowed by shadow. More than anything, I was struck by its deep sense of ease, and how familiar it felt. I’d grown up in a small town in India, in a bungalow with a veranda not unlike this porch. Standing on it that freezing night, I suddenly felt a little less cold.