How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

It’s not easy to have a people; to come from a people. It’s not easy to not just be a super-special, historically unique subject railing against the world (Loser, indeed) but someone instead pinned by context, easy to trace—someone who shows up in the census. I don’t just mean the people you’re born to, although that’s one way of having a people. And your people are not always the ones who keep you safe or sane, and sometimes you need to run from them—certainly I’ve belonged to a few peoples in my time, and I’ve run away from one or two of mine. And I don’t imagine it’s easy to go your entire life being the expected universal reader, and then to suddenly be named as the specific, contextualized, white middle-class reader. But we can only be each other’s people if we actually do the work of being each other’s people: looking our shared history in the face and really reading it. An expected reader always expects to be led by the hand; the unexpected reader knows we get lost in each other.