sarah HANNAH gómez

in the shadow of liberty

I read In the Shadow of Liberty in just under two hours, over the course of two nights of elliptical sessions. It’s a quick read. I made a mistake making it my gym book, because holding a hardcover with one hand two nights in a row is a great recipe for finger pain and hand cramps. This is good, but I don’t see it as quite as revolutionary and amazing as so many others seem to. That may be a…

(via How we fail people of color with eating disorders | Fusion)

I have so much to say about this article. It’s depressing af, obviously, but it’s also vindicating in that it’s something I’ve noticed but never really taken the time to explore or research or connect with, aside from recently committing to a therapist who is a woman of color, in the hopes that she’ll be able to work with me not just on my equal opportunity mental illness but also the psychology of race and ethnicity and how that plays into it as well. (By the way, you can find mental health, nutrition, and other health professionals at mavenclinic.com if you are a woman, and your first appointment is free [up to $25 value] with the code ARIZONAHG, and yes, I get a tiny kickback, but I’m saying it because I’ve been using the service for a month and it’s already amazing and it’s cheaper than copays and available at weird times of day, which is SO SO SO useful for me. Anyway.)

I was really excited about a lot of books this spring. You may recall that I wrote a whole post about it. There was a lot of #blackgirlmagic in the works, and nothing could be better or more necessary than that. The biggest readers in the country are college-educated black women, while in the UK (and I gather in the US), young black girls are the biggest demographic of readers under 18. We…

As a member of a dominant culture (that is, a white Australian living in a nation whose prosperity is built on the destruction of Indigenous cultures), I am powerfully conscious of the fact that I am an outsider to those cultures. This means that I am an outsider also to Australian Indigenous textuality, and that I must approach Indigenous texts in a very different way from how I read the Western texts that lie within the ambit of my experience and training as a scholar. My training in the methodologies and theories of Western scholarship is so central to my repertoire of reading strategies and theoretical understandings that when I read Indigenous texts I frequently experience a sense of destabilization. I say to myself: But how does this text work? What can it mean? My experience of textual unfamiliarity is itself a cue, alerting me to the fact that I am reading a text that originates from a culture different from my own.

-Clare Bradford, “Critical Reading of Children’s Texts,” Critical Content Analysis of Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Reframing Perspective, edited by Holly Johnson, Janelle Mathis, Kathy G. Short

Bradford is a children’s literature academic who tends toward postcolonial reads of literature from all over the world. I don’t know her, but she seems pretty chill, and I’ve read her work before, and it, too, is chill. Trust her; she has hella qualifications to be telling you what to do.

I get that authors, agents, and editors are not scholars. You don’t have to be. This is still applicable to you if you are not an #ownvoices writer when it comes to a particular work*. Bradford later goes on to remind us all that “cultural outsiders...are not entitled to understand all that there is to know of the worlds of these texts” (emphasis mine), and I (and others on Twitter and beyond who explain this ad nauseum) would like to add that that doesn’t mean it’s not a good work worth representing/publishing. This is why sensitivity readers exist. This is why non-dominant-group editors and agents must exist. But in the meantime, you employ the former to make up for not having the latter; you don’t tell a writer from outside your experience that they’re not accessible just because you don’t understand every little thing. Nobody understands everything. Get schooled; don’t demand remedial lessons or watered down explanations of everything that you have randomly determined are not understandable to your fallacious idea of what most readers are.

If you’re a writer from a dominant social group, and especially if you are one of the butthurt trolls who has been derailing Twitter conversations lately, your takeaway here should be that now you can understand a bit more why minority writers are frustrated with you stealing our stories. You can write about us if you do your homework, but our voices are still more authoritative than yours; our voices are still stifled while yours are free to fly; and our culture is not a la carte or on sale for you. It’s expensive, and when it comes to expensive things, you should do a lot of waiting to make sure that thing is really what you want and need and can take care of.