Goodbye, Goodreads: My Final Post!

I wrote my first Goodreads blog on August 20, 2013. Initially, I saw writing a blog on a site that focused on reading as a way to promote and sell books, but I sold more books at parties with my Cal Poly Pomona English Department colleagues than I did on any social media site. Eventually, I saw writing a blog as a way of having my say without having to write and publish a book, which took too long. I liked the instant gratification of writing commentary and then publishing it myself. By the third blog, I had found a blog day—Sunday. Like the scholarship girl I’ve been since at least junior high school, I never missed a Sunday. A few months ago, to relieve the Sunday pressure, I expanded my writing period to the weekend. Usually that meant writing on Friday morning. During the first year, I wrote every week, but on August 17, 2014, I announced that I would write every other week. I had found a new site—Google+—where I had more followers and received more feedback. I stopped writing on Google+ shortly after Trump became President because the conservatives all ignored or blocked me, and the liberals got on my nerves with their PCing and METOOing. Today is the last day that I will write a blog on Goodreads. Yesterday I wrote my last book review.

I’m not leaving this site because I’m frustrated by the lack of entertaining conversations and debates. Except for the occasional debate in response to a review, I haven’t had conversations on Goodreads since I left the liberal Goodreads group around the same time that I stopped posting on Google+. I’m leaving because Goodreads is another media site that is promoting METOO instead of anti-racism. Until yesterday, I had never been censored by the Goodreads police. When I wrote a blog with the provocative title “Positive Discrimination” and tweeted it, the Twitter police censored me (but to their credit did not censor my mean tweets attacking their censorship of black women), and Goodreads flagged it, not allowing me to post the blog on Facebook or Twitter for a couple of weeks, but then I guess someone read the content of the blog (the Twitter police may not read anything longer than four sentences) and realized it wasn’t as provocative as the title.

Although I’ve made a point of not blocking or reporting anyone, no matter how crude and vicious their insults, last week I flagged two one-star, two-sentence Goodreads reviews of my books because they were clearly written by someone with an agenda, someone who hadn’t read the books. A woman named Molly said that my books were disgusting, and I was a disgusting person. When I checked yesterday, one of those reviews had been taken down, but the other was still there. One reason I flagged the reviews is I remembered a statement by the Goodreads administrators about eliminating reviews by people who might be involved in a coordinated campaign. When I saw the attacks on me and my two books, I assumed they came from a white supremacist. However, as I read a few of Molly’s other reviews, I saw that she had called someone else disgusting because of what she considered to be racist comments. I decided then (and the actions of the Goodreads police confirmed my suspicions) that she probably objected to my anti-METOO commentary.

In 2019 I read and wrote a review of KNOW MY NAME, a book written by the infamous (at least to me) Emily Doe (see the 6/19/15 post). I found it amusing that Emily or Chanel (her very appropriate real name), who I assumed was white, was half-Chinese and looked Chinese. My review was lengthy and scathing. One Emily/Chanel fan called me names a day or two after I posted my review, and her comment was censored (I found it in my e-mail in-box, but by the time I looked for it on Goodreads, it had been removed). However, yesterday, more than two years after I posted that review, it was removed for violating community standards dealing with personal attacks and hate speech. Well, I did include some hateful comments about Chanel, but I also complimented her writing and said in some ways she seemed less villainous in her book than in her narcissistic victim impact statement since the cops and the media were the ones who falsely accused Brock Turner of rape (demonizing a college freshman) before she embraced her victimhood. I criticized her for her lack of empathy for Brock’s mother and her lack of gratitude to Stanford. It was one of my better reviews, well-written and passionate. I was proud of it as I told the Goodreads police in my scathing, “hateful” attack on them. My review showed that I had read and thought about Chanel’s book. The jerk who attacked me and my two books didn’t mention one detail from the books to explain why she thought they and I were disgusting.

As soon as I made my decision to leave Goodreads, I felt more relief than sadness. I had just been complaining to a fellow early morning walker who was wearing a neck brace because of arthritis about my occasionally painful neck and shoulders, caused primarily by spending too much time writing on my I-Pad. We both agreed that being tense aggravated the condition, and writing is both pleasurable and tense for me (especially since this I-Pad has sabotaged me a few times). I like sharing my thoughts and believe that they are usually worth sharing, but I can share them less frequently on other sites. I had planned to write on the topic “Crazy Uncle Don And Wise Auntie Mary: What Smart Black Women Have In Common With An Insane White Supremacist” on Friday or Saturday. And I’m sorry that I never got around to writing a blog post in praise of “a few good white women,” tentatively titled “The Kathy G’s And The KK Women.” I thought my praise of Kathy Griffith, Kathy Griffin, and the Kardashian women would be a good counter to my incessant rants (and I won’t stop until I hear or read others ranting with me) about “the majority of white women voting for a self-proclaimed sexual assaulter, an insane white supremacist, twice,” and to the misuse and abuse of my most loyal blog reader’s name—Karen—to call out obnoxious white women.

Goodbye, Goodreads! Since I’m not addictive (although I am somewhat fanatical), I probably won’t miss you anymore than I have missed reading NEWSWEEK, TIME, and USA TODAY or watching MSNBC and CNN. I hope you take my advice and change your name to Badreads or Baddeeds. It’s a more appropriate name for a site that silences a black woman who spent most of her now long life promoting reading and spent more than thirty years of that long life teaching students of all ages, genders, races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, religions, political affiliations, and sexual orientations how to read more carefully and think more critically about what they’re reading. Shame on you for abusing and silencing a well-educated, “wise auntie”! And shame on you for promoting METOO!