How to Read Now: Essays

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.

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.

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.

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, a

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

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

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.

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.

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.