What I’m much more curious about is what these fuckups reveal about readership: who we expect our readers to be, what we expect our readers to do, and how this might change.

Books, as world-encompassing as they are, aren’t the destination; they’re a waypoint.

The stakes of this fight remind us that intergenerational justice means thinking about intergenerational inheritances, down to the trees and the birds—not least of all because the fact that environmental justice is linked to the legacy of coloniality necessarily means that environmental justice is racial justice.

Anyone who is perfectly comfortable with keeping the world just as it is now and reading it the way they’ve always read it—is, frankly, a fed, cannot be trusted, and is probably wiretapping your phone.

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

Certainly modernity has taught us the beguiling story of our porousness; being full of gaps is also a way of being full of market opportunities.

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.

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.

When I say that white supremacy makes for terrible readers, I mean that white supremacy is, among its myriad ills, a formative collection of fundamentally shitty reading techniques that impoverishes you as a reader, a thinker, and a feeling person; it’s an education that promises that whole swaths of the world and their liveliness will be diminishe