True story: A few months ago, a producer from a literary show on Boston Public Radio asked me to read a section of my book on air. I sent it to him and he said he would need to edit it down. I totally got it. Radio is a different medium. Stories need to change. Sure! Change away. Then I got the edits back. Some of them were normal cutting 300 words to 25, but there were others. My characters' names, he wrote, were confusing. There were three in the scene, could I cut them to two if I was going to stick with the unfamiliar names? And then there was this other note, even stranger. In a sentence setting the scene up, I had written "three East Indian teenagers, kids of immigrants, sit talking on the roof of the house." In his notes, the producer had crossed out East Indian and written "ASIAN INDIAN." Asian Indian. As if that is a thing that anyone has ever said to anyone else, excluding the sentence — “Not like American Indian, like Asian Indian.” And the note went on: "Alas!" — not kidding, he really said Alas! like he was some Victorian maiden — "Alas! Americans aren’t familiar with the term East Indian — it’s just not something we say over here."

This is when my soul kind of made a Chewbacca noise. That horrible howl.

I took a deep breath. Oh, who am I kidding? I took a shot of whiskey. Then I wrote back. "Alas!" I wrote — mainly because I wanted to see if it would turn me into a white lady in a petticoat — "Alas, Boston Public Radio Producer of Literary Shows — I am from America! I was born here, and have lived here many decades among other Americans, other East Indian Americans, even, which is what we are called, but if that makes you uncomfortable in some way we can always use the broader term South Asian."

We used South Asian.

I was not OK about this for days. Days. And why? It wasn’t such a big deal, compared to other discrimination I’ve faced in my life. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen on tour — like the time at a book festival party in Florida, when a donor I’d been talking to all night suddenly burst out with, “Your English is so good, I can barely hear your accent!” Or the Q&A after a reading in Massachusetts, when a guy in his sixties raised his hand and asked, “My son is dating an Indian woman?”

But this thing with the Boston radio producer really got under my skin in a way neither of those did. And I couldn’t figure out exactly why until I talked to my best friend, Alison, and she said, “I think it’s the way he cloaked his casual racism in his profession, like it was only professional to point out to you how confusing you are to his audience.”

Here is the thing about how discrimination works: No one ever comes right out and says, “We don’t want you.” In the publishing world, they don’t say, “We just don’t want your story.” They say, “We’re not sure you're relatable” and “You don’t want to exclude anyone with your work.” They say, “We’re not sure who your audience is.”