Hi friends, 

There's a TikTok making the rounds from an author proposing a theory about why some people don't read Black books. In this video, she hypothesizes that some readers feel unsafe in Black spaces. And Black books—with Black characters, Black experiences, and Black interiority—are Black spaces. She was careful to clarify that she wasn't calling this right or wrong, but was instead offering it as an explanation. Then, she pitched her own books at the end as diverse, because they don't exclusively feature Black characters.

Somewhere buried in here is a real conversation, and it's buried under two specific failures of framing. 

First, if you're going to propose that some people avoid Black books because Black spaces feel unsafe to them, you cannot present that neutrally. That feeling, that position, has a name. People who experience Blackness itself as unsafe, who feel threatened or endangered by a fictional Black neighborhood, a Black narrator, Black experiences, Black love, Black triumphs, or Black complexity, are being racist. I'd argue that this video presented it as a consumer preference more than anything else, no judgment attached. But I'm judging. None of us is obligated to be neutral about the white supremacy that taught people that Black meant unsafe. 

Second, you cannot diagnose that fear and then, in the same video, pitch your books as diverse in comparison, because the implication is right there, whether it was said or not. If Black stories feel unsafe to some readers, then her "diverse" ones are a safer option. And that's a pitch that only works if the fear stays intact, or at the very least, it's a pitch that has pitted itself against those other Black stories. 

To be frank, I don't think the OP approached this with the depth needed to truly discuss what she said, nor does it seem like she's fully unpacked the racism represented there or her relationship to it, which is only made more evident as she keeps doubling and tripling down. But there is something to discuss here, apart from the original failure to do so cogently. 

I think the operative feeling for most of these readers is discomfort, and I do think that we are living in a social and political moment where discomfort registers as danger. Now, I want to be clear, however, that choosing to frame this as a safety issue instead of a comfort issue, and particularly using the comparison of riding through the hood, is dignifying this piece of racist avoidance. It takes a threat to your ease and gives it the language of a threat to your person, and that simply cannot be presented unexamined.

The truth is that part of growing up in a white supremacist society means growing up in a society where white is established as the default. Media, as one of the institutions that socializes and normalizes, is primarily white, and so the majority of us are simply trained on white stories. For those of us who aren't white, that meant our media education came with a secondary education in reading outside of our experience. This meant relating to characters who didn't look like us, finding ourselves in stories that weren't written with us in mind, loving things that didn't belong to us, and having conversations with things that weren't addressed to us. Nobody asked if we were comfortable. That was simply what reading was. And like anything you practice for a lifetime, we get good at it. 

If you have never had to do that, if every default points at you, then you never build that muscle. That's not a moral accusation in and of itself, but rather a symptom of a white supremacist society. It means that when these readers first encounter stories that aren't calibrated to them, they might be bad at reading them. You only have to look around the low-star reviews of books by non-white authors for evidence: the names were too hard to pronounce, the references don't land, the interiority was hard to read or map. All skill gap issues presented as review. 

Now, put that reader in our current era where—at least in my anecdotal experience—comfort has become one of the dominant things people ask of media. Think of some of the discourse we've seen recently: I only read first person because I have to be able to put myself in the character's shoes. I can't relate to the main character, so this was a bad book or a bad reading experience. Just recently, I saw a joking TikTok about readers who refuse to accept a character's name or description and substitute it with whatever they prefer. The text is simply a suggestion, but comfort becomes the real author, or at least the arbiter of what a story should be. 

If we follow this logic to the end, we encounter readers who translate a book that decenters them into a product they didn't ask for, and one they may stop ordering. No one has to consciously hold a racist belief for that pattern to complete itself. It's a kind of avoidance that runs on autopilot and is served by the ease with which the industry delivers the default. It must be, then, deeply uncomfortable to be confronted with the idea that you feel unsafe where you feel challenged, and it's always difficult to remember that we live in a society where many people see Black spaces in all their forms as unsafe. 

And, of course, I have to clarify that reading for escapism isn't a moral failing, and that most of us do it to some degree. This is a question of frequency. A matter of diet. If your comfort becomes the entire criterion, especially as someone who is represented in media by default, you will fall into the flow of the default. That tide will simply carry you. That is to say, you must work to challenge the default, and comfort resists work. 

If you are someone who wants to decolonize your shelves, or even just to be a better reader than you currently are, I'll tell you the true thing: it'll be uncomfortable at first, the way that any unpracticed skill is uncomfortable. You will read books that are not written for you, and you will feel that, and the feeling is not a flaw in the book. Relatability has never been a precondition for empathy. Some of us have known that since we were children because we were never given the option of anything else. 

I'll repeat the other true thing: viewing Black spaces as inherently unsafe is racism. And any argument that presents the idea of Black spaces as unsafe, for anyone, without naming the racism is participating in said racism. 

Reading can be escapism, and I'd never take that from anyone. But sometimes I fear some readers are claiming they want escapism when they are never leaving their own head, their own experiences, or the things they find most comfortable. 

All reading skills are learnable. Muscle builds. But you do have to try. 

♥️

Marines

If you want to put any of this into practice, the simplest way is to buy, read, review, and talk about Black books consistently, not just when the discourse demands it. And if you'd like to support my work as an Afro-Latina publisher, Mareas is a good place to start. Our latest, Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine Holmes, is a story about the price Black women pay for the comfort of others, and it's available wherever books are sold. It will absolutely ask something of you, but that is the point.