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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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