How to Read Now: Essays

White supremacy is a comprehensive cultural education whose primary function is to prevent people from reading—engaging with, understanding—the lives of people outside its scope.

To mobilize any polity is difficult enough, and the politics mobilized around immediate tragedy have a historically understandable tendency toward triage: treating the life-threatening symptom before addressing the life-shaping cause.

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.

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.

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

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.

I was seeing something I didn’t know yet that I’d always wanted, always needed, a yearning in me I had yet to name: the erotic tenderness of a lover who protects the space around which you can be vulnerable, and therefore safe, and therefore free.

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.