Out of Place and Time

Toward the end of grade 6, Ian Williams asked if he could play the French horn (the same instrument that his crush played). “The music teacher shook her head,” he recalls in Disorientation, his recent collection of essays. “I supposed I had failed the pitch test. I was prepared to try again.” But the teacher was more concerned with his lips than with his ear. “The mouthpiece is too small for you,” she told him. Eventually, the future writer and professor did take up the French horn, “and I was terrible.” Later he realized that he was simply unable to hear the notes, but his former teacher’s racially tinged remark continues to weigh on him.

With his book, Williams describes how racism can interrupt and stall the forward momentum of one’s life, how even throwaway comments like the one he heard all those years ago can disorient, and how the consequences can ­linger. Seemingly everyday experiences are often fraught as well. Consider smiling, something many people...