I wrote about ‘90s-era Puff Daddy, a shockingly novel, inspirational, and aspirational figure who offered my teenage friends and me a vision of autonomy and self-invention we could wholly relate to. His was an example of entry into the good life of the American mainstream in terms we could actually understand. Discredited and wholly disgraced now, back then he symbolized something else entirely—the free black man who is really just another iteration of the all-American dream, a real-life Great Gatsby.