No, what they are defending is their comfort, and what they are preserving is their power—neither of which is the same thing as freedom, as those of us who have known lives without either can attest.

Firs, roses, statues—and the placards that adorn them—are like history books in public: they’re civic sites of collective reading, where the statue tells us to read the ground we’re standing on; to interpret it in a specific way.

It’s impossible to untangle our disastrous climate present from our disastrous colonial past.

This is writing as sleight of hand, as balancing act, writing as parlor trick to be pulled off—not writing as a practice of being in the world, being of the world.

Readers do half the work of a book’s life; that means we must do half the heavy lifting of its project.

Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with and appropriative of its language—its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.

An expected reader always expects to be led by the hand; the unexpected reader knows we get lost in each other.

Committing to being an unexpected reader means committing to the knowledge that what bonds us together is neither the sham empathy that comes from predigested ethnographic sound bites passing as art in late capitalism, nor the vague gestures at free speech that flatter the tenured powerful and scold their freelance critics—but the visceral shock,

The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.