When I was 16 years old, my beloved college counselor told me that it was a good thing I wanted to be a physicist because I wasn’t much of a writer. We were close—I had her home phone number for emergencies—and it wasn’t a mean-spirited comment. She was right—writing was my weak spot. When I went into my frosh exposition class at Harvard six months later, I was understood by the entire seminar to be the worst writer in the class.

Peer edits were a struggle; our instructor tried her best. I was a Black working-class student from an underfunded school district, and they treated me with the kind of pity that white liberals understood to be kindness. When I look back on my final essay, I see smart ideas and a writer who could not get comfortable inside of a sentence. I could not find my voice on the page.…