My story is a Myth of Othering. It takes this form: Confronted by his cultural illiteracy--his exclusion from and his inability to read, not just black culture, but electronic culture--a white boy compensates. Projecting his own feelings of exclusion onto a black classmate--who appears to be a model of ecstasy under control (an icon of grace, marking an entrance to another world)--the white boy idealizes blackness as a solution to being marginalized, cut off from the world. He falls in love with soul music, specifically, and with popular culture, generally.

It's an old story, this ethnographic tale of redemption by the Other.