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headfirst into my bedroom door before dribbling some toothpaste on the top of my head. Whatever the outcome, I enjoyed these games. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of fighting back. This would generally wake Emily up, but I didn’t care.
    It was when Emily was three or so that I figured out that, for whatever reason, she preferred me to Paul. She grew obsessed with an illustrated storybook called The Princess of REDACTED , which recounted the (obviously racist, in retrospect) tale of a young European princess who has been kidnapped by a Moor and taken back to the kingdom of REDACTED , and who through various plot machinations involving a kindhearted maid, an evil Mohammadan Priest, and a brave Prince Valiant lookalike disguised as a merchant, is rescued from her bondage. Sometimes Paul picked up the book to read it to her, but she would snatch it away and say: “Arthur read!” This left Paul confused and frustrated, and of course anything that frustrated Paul delighted me. Even when he wasn’t around, she begged me to read this book to her, over and over again, and when I got fed up with reading, she would relieve me of the book and then pretend to read it, reciting the story as best as she could remember, or just making up a new story entirely.
    Occasionally she would stray from the book and devise plotlines of her own, which she would then enlist me in acting out. She usually played the role of a beautiful princess from an evil kingdom, and I would play her brother, whose main role was usually to tell her that she had been abducted as a baby, and that she was actually a princess from the good kingdom. Then I would play the prince from the good kingdom, whose job it was to marry her. Sometimes I said that that didn’t make any sense, since if she was actually a princess from the good kingdom and I was a prince from the good kingdom, then we were brother and sister and couldn’t get married. She told me that that was stupid, and then we would continue playing with the dolls. There were other times when I would play the evil prince, the oldest one—whom she, to my amusement, called “Bastard.” But she would always come back to The Princess of REDACTED . She said that the princess was stupid for not wanting to stay in REDACTED , because REDACTED was the most beautiful kingdom in the world. Even more than the story itself, she loved to look at the pictures, the drawings of REDACTED Palace, which seemed to extend for many, many acres. “Let’s move to REDACTED !” she said. “I will be the princess and you will be the prince.”
    A young graduate student I dated very briefly in the nineties—one of the few people to whom I have even mentioned that I had a sister—told me that this book was racist, and the fact that my sister loved it so much proved she was racist as well. I dumped her on the spot. She got her revenge a few weeks later, when she emailed to say that she had discovered that not only did my sister like an arguably racist book (although it really was obviously racist, I knew that even if I couldn’t admit it to the graduate student), but my grandfather had written an inarguably racist book. This is, unfortunately, true. Arthur Huntington II was a devotee of the infamous early-twentieth-century eugenicists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, and sometime in the late 1920s my grandfather wrote a book called The Color of Our Destruction , published by a small imprint that was either a vanity press or an imprint dedicated to racist publications. My grandfather’s suicide note also included a lot of bile about the destruction of the white race; he wanted to “get off the earth before the colored races take it over.” The book, the suicide note, and my grandfather all have one thing in common: they all have nothing to do with me. To hold me accountable for my grandfather’s actions is fairly explicitly anti-American.
    As Emily got a