That art should not serve to make us comfortable is such a basic argument I’m loathe to even repeat it. Yet the arguments about the comforts or disruptions of art cannot be held in good faith if we don’t address the fact that a white supremacist reading culture means we are conditioned to accept that some of our work is in fact routinely expected to comfort; that the work of writers of color must often in some way console, educate, provide new definitions, great epiphanies, and, most of all—that buzzword of both the commercial marketplace and political theater—be relevant. Whereas the work of
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