The year before I entered the University of California, Santa Barbara, during the middle of the Vietnam War, a UCSB student was shot and killed during anti-war protests (a war, I realized, that drew inordinately from minorities whose rights at home were often abused). Once I joined the student protests, I was tear-gassed on three occasions and chased by law enforcement through the streets of Isla Vista, the campus community besieged by hundreds of armed, riot-geared police and National Guard. The experience indelibly imprinted on me what a highly disproportionate response to civil unrest looks and feels like. Yet, I realized then and now, this was but a tiny fraction of the way minority demonstrators—and nonminority sympathizers standing alongside them—continually felt when protesting against racial injustice for the past 150 years. Just in the decade of the 1960’s, there were dozens of such incidents (a few highlighted in A Black Picket Fence), many of these not confined to the Deep South. And for every such event that made headlines, there were hundreds (if not thousands) that went undocumented. With the advent of IPhone photos and recordings, the extent of these atrocities is becoming startlingly visible.

In the late-1970’s, I went on to earn an M.B.A. from U.C.L.A. and was hired by Morgan, Stanley in New York as a stock trader. As fate would have it, the high energy intensity of that environment suited me to a tee and, at the age of thirty-two, I was named to head up the firm’s newly-formed International Equity Department where I soon had sales and trading professionals reporting to me from New York, London, Tokyo Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Singapore while traveling in excess of 100,000 miles per year. My reputation was such that The London Times referred to me as “a Wall Street trading legend,” and “…a heavy hitter.”

What I also came to realize over those years is that much of Wall Street was rife with corruption. Around the age of forty, deciding I’d seen enough of this professional darker-side—in a surprise to nearly everyone—I abruptly decided to get up from my desk, quit, and return to California with my growing family. Originally consulting on trading matters for a Warren Buffet subsidiary, I also coached my four sons’ baseball, basketball, and soccer teams while turning to writing. My first two novels, financial thrillers (award-winning Man in the Middle and The Deadly Trade) drew upon my capital markets experiences with both the famous and infamous. I eventually veered to writing about political and economic issues with a progressive perspective for publications such as TruthOut.org, San Francisco Chronicle, RealMoney.com, among others. That philosophical stance led me to sign on as lead-writer on what became a New York Times bestselling expose of former GOP Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin (Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: Simon & Schuster’s Howard Books).

Throughout these years, however, I continued to write notes and collect observations about social, political, and economic injustices that bothered me; the seed that was planted when, as an 11 year old in the St. Louis suburbs (like the narrator in A Black Picket Fence), had grown into a compulsion that became a thirty-year effort culminating in A Black Picket Fence. In sum, writing this novel had become vitally important to me. And along the way—in researching the events and histories—I shared with the novel’s protagonists (and with some of the antagonists) the lessons and insights they uncovered as individuals and as a family.

Once finished, however, I learned my novel is one of many that have, these past half-dozen years, faced resistance from both literary agents and publishers because of what is termed “racial appropriation.” The argument is that a white author has no right to write—even if the perspective is wholly through the eyes of an 11 year-old white boy—about racial issues. Obviously I disagree.

One publisher told me, because of these concerns, “The timing for A Black Picket Fence is just not right…” An agent admitted that backlash is so severe that To Kill a Mockingbird and Tom Sawyer wouldn’t find a publishing home today (if one Googles each title alongside cultural appropriation, the truth of these words becomes evident). The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (Aug 18, 2026)  wrote about an author friend with 16 New York Times Bestsellers who had his latest novel—with a black woman as a “leading character”—rejected “by roughly 20 major imprints because he (the author) was white.”

The absurdly slippery slope of these blacklists would be that a person of color should also never include any white protagonists (or significant white non-minor characters) in their works. If so, we are left with a literary world of books with only white characters or books with only non-white characters. In other words, readers are subjected to a Mason-Dixon fictional divide. This literary segregation does absolutely nothing to enlighten or further Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s belief that “The arc of the moral universe…bends towards justice.”

This insanity seems as absurd as suggesting a person should not participate in confronting injustice unless that person is personally aggrieved, denying that empathy and insight might extend beyond someone’s direct experiences. Writing is about digging into our hearts and minds to create a meaningful and, hopefully, entertaining message. We need fewer closed-minds and could benefit from additional literary eyes-that-see married to hearts-that-feel; maybe even acknowledge that “racial appreciation” sometimes supersedes “appropriation.”

Ironically (and thankfully) in a Kirkus’ Review of A Black Picket Fence, the reviewer praised the novel as “…a timely tale of familial courage,” and “…a startlingly relevant story about standing up to racism.”

As such, it seems to me that whenever anyone lends a “startlingly relevant” and “timely” voice toward providing insight into any important social issue, it ought to be a good thing, not a thing to be summarily dismissed.