How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

if we don’t figure out a different way to read our world, we’ll be doomed to keep living in it.

Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity.

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.

The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.

while there were of course conflicts mainly across class and colorist lines, whiteness was not the reference point or framework in my community, and so I did not learn early on to prioritize it in my psychic, intellectual, or sociopolitical life.

But the idea that fiction builds empathy is one of incomplete politics, left hanging by probably good intentions. The concept of instrumentalizing fiction or art as a kind of ethical protein shake, such that reading more and more diversely will somehow build the muscles in us that will help us see other people as human, makes a kind of superficial sense—and produces a superficial effect.

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.

if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy,

Being capable of engaging with both Austen’s work and the historical realities of its time period is not a mutually exclusive exercise, but a mutually formative one, the very stuff of being a reader in the first place. To insist otherwise only reinforces the false universalizing of our art that Morrison once called tantamount to a lobotomizing of our art. The people who think that upholding a heavily edited and whitewashed truth about an author’s historical context is the only viable way to truly protect and honor that author’s work, are in fact protecting and honoring something else entirely.

the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions.

When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader.

The American origin story is written in Native genocide, transatlantic slavery, and imperial subjugation overseas.

we have to center Indigenous histories, support self-determination, and build decolonized futures by given back stolen land.

That people in the past had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong doesn’t alter the fact that they were wrong—it

To challenge these monuments—to question the old story they’ve had so long to tell—is not only a vital act of civil disobedience. It’s a revolutionary act of reading.

The decolonial point here is not to give voice to the voiceless, but to recognize the voices that have always been there—to recognize them, and to honor them.

I’ve personally never been particularly interested in separating the art from the artist, an impulse of exceedingly mild intellectual rigor, which has only ever really served the powerful and protected abusers

it was paramount for white settler colonials to believe the lie that the land they were occupying was “a blank page waiting to be inscribed,” that it was this lie that allowed America to tell the story of itself

the humor of people who’ve known intergenerational trauma is also nearly always a defense mechanism, a way to deflect,

if the settler colonial “I” was ever tasked to focus on its debts rather than its dread, the whole tawdry American story would collapse in on itself, like a black hole finally swallowing up the place where a star used to glint.

Matthews, Patricia, A. “I Hope White Hands: Wedgwood, Abolition, and the Female Consumer,” YouTube webinar, March 20, 2017.