This is a well-written piece, and if you came to the conclusion that you didn't want to write this story, then fair enough.

Personally, I don't entirely buy into the cultural appropriation argument. For me, the whole point of this exercise is to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes. My success or failure in that respect should be about the quality of my stories and nothing more. Yes, it’s true that people writing within their racial, cultural, or gender experience might produce work with different, perhaps truer insight, but that doesn’t mean such subject matter should be off limits to talented authors capable of exercising their imagination and doing their research thoroughly.

Think of the many classics we wouldn’t have if this way of thinking were adopted throughout history. Should Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese man, not have written about the upstairs/downstairs culture of the 1930s English upper class in The Remains of the Day? What about Shakespeare? Mark Twain? Harper Lee?