The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Margaret Seltzer and Vanishing Odds

A guest post from David Plotz, who writes:

That was a great post, Melonyce. It got me thinking about why my immediate reaction was so skeptical, based on what little I knew about the book. Was it just some reflexive racism of the sort you describe—no way a white kid gets sent to a poor black foster family? Or was it something else? And I haven’t really settled it in my own mind.

I think the answer is that I did a quick mental calculation that went something like this: How many white kids get placed in black foster families? How often do those foster families happen to be right in the middle of gangland, USA? What are the chances that that kid then grows up to be a gang girl and gang mascot who witnesses murders, etc.? And what are the chances that she then makes it entirely out of gangworld? And what are the chances she then turns out to be a really good writer? And what are the chances she happens to get her writing into the hands of a swanky New York publishing house? I think the result of that mental calculation was the notion that there was a small chance that each one of these things could be true but an infinintessimally small chance that they all could be true.