12 frogs in a trench coat

Got really into the readings for my master's in history & doing some additional reading on the side to keep me hyped. Featuring a very aesthetically pleasing but slightly squished chocolate croissant.

Spent most of this invigilating season in this room with the same chief and it was lovely, some of my favourite people and locations I've worked with in this job. :)

The brilliant Toni Morrison explained this in an interview of hers (here's another; watch her doc!!!) that there's this assumption that one's readers are white. So when she would purposefully- and there's a difference!- write stories for the Black gaze, that certain things didn't have to be explained because we Understood, it would get frustrating for white readers. They felt left out, unappealed to, hurt.

And yet, that's standard fare- and everyone's not writing such specific stories like Toni! To be "fair", we did understand y'all. We had to. But those same techniques, both in writing and in media consumption, I believe are atrophied from white viewers ("I don't watch this because I don't relate!" Or projection of ones own identity into Black characters to be "relatable") because it's not Socially Required for you to apply them.