I first reached out to Gloria in an email over a decade ago. I was working on a project about race, racism and white accountability — not the accountability of white women expressly, but of whiteness (before we were regularly using that term in common parlance), and its role in shaping perceptions of race and perpetuating black stereotypes. I wanted to talk with white public figures from a variety of fields, who were smart, honest and self-aware, and who had created culturally important work that also contributed somehow to the national conversation about race, but not in a glaringly obvious way. Gloria was at the top of my list — others included Tony Kushner, Cindy Sherman and Agnes Gund — because in my early 20s, I loved New York Magazine, and she was among the magazine’s first columnists.

Also, from reading about the genesis and early days of New York Magazine, I knew that she had written this very famous story in 1969, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” in which she writes about black women and people as, well, human. And then, of course, that she founded Ms. Magazine with the black feminist and child-welfare advocate Dorothy Pitman Hughes. To be honest, I was actually a little skeptical of her intentions, as I was when I met my white husband 16 years ago, who was that day traveling to a conference on race at Harvard. (“Who is this white person who cares about race, who considers blackness and black culture, without expecting any accolades in return?” I remember wondering.)