As a woman, I always seem to know when a book I’m reading was written by a man, it's the kind of thing you can't really explain but always intrinsically know, and is often bothersome. It somehow never occurred to me that that is exactly how poc feel about most popular media being written, produced, created by and for white people.

essay 1 - “how to read now”

most of the time bigotry isn't ignorance, most bigots aren't under-educated, they are over-educated white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity

even readers that claim or try to be “diversifying their reading” expect books by authors of colour to teach them specific lessons, and call it done once they think they have done enough, cared enough, put in enough effort to educate and better themselves

privileged readers only go to them for stories about suffering, hardship, war, their own sins, going back to white writers for everything else, poc authors can only ever be poc authors, vessels for exotic, sensational trauma-porn

while white authors get to just be artists, unnamed, universal, afforded much more depth and critical engagement

we go to authors of colour to learn the specific, and to white writers to feel the universal

essay 2 - “reading teaches us empathy, and other fictions”

jane austen, handke

books as an empathy builder, an incomplete idea - we shouldn't need to read to figure out that people that are different than us are also human, people deserving of empathy, viewing reading as a tool to build empathy puts extra labour on poc/marginalised authors, which isn't compensated, they're like unpaid personal trainers

the reading isn't political crowd / art for art’s sake - seems to claim books as art, true art, exist completely removed from any sociopolitical context, current or of the time they were written, and that to try to analyse them based on politics is anachronistic blasphemy, that it lessens its value, and that they should be allowed to read whatever they want without having to think too deeply about it, or scrutinise it

yet, it is a political statement to say that only white authors make Real Art That Must Be Protected, nonpolitical art, while Everyone Else is inherently politicised

they only see books as empathy builders when they are trying to make you empathetic towards The Other, because books that make you empathetic towards white men are just the Status Quo

books as inheritance - a way to get to know ourselves, where we came from, eachother, how we affect each other

for white people to not see themselves as special, singular, sole, free actor in the world (where just not being racist is enough), but instead as one small flawed part of a whole