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There’s a lot that doesn’t sit right with my spirit about people being up in arms about that Democrat/republican book as beyond the pale when a lot of y’all have hyped blatantly anti-Black books and the authors who write them. This outrage feels fickle.
I'm annoyed for many reasons but as Tasha said in this thread, part of what's pissing me off is the presentism of the outrage. To say "read the room" about a dem/rep romance suggests that it's only wrong in this moment to publish this kind of romance https://twitter.com/tashalharrison/status/1248597900831141895?s=20
But was a republican hero not reprehensible in the height of the AIDS crisis? was a Democratic hero acceptable while Bill Clinton was in office? and the idea that the white democratic woman is supposed to be automatically relatable and good is a hell of a stretch when Marianne
Williamson and Amy Klobuchar lasted in the primaries longer than Kamala Harris with more fucked up platforms. It's fine to think that a particular type of character is off-putting at particular moments, but I need white readers esp to stop deciding that b/c something offends them
it's now all of a sudden offensive. and to my actual point, because I'm tired and getting a lil stir crazy a particular publisher has been churning out some super problematic books with cartoon covers but the only ones that garner this kind of outrage from white readers are the
ones written by a white author. meanwhile a biracial woman wrote a racist, anti-Black, tragic mulatto narrative that deploys old stereotypes about my community while purportedly speaking to the experiences of people like me and with my background and everyone just let it rock.
I've watched a bunch of the same people who are scandalized about this messy political romance put that book and plenty of others just as anti-Black on best of lists, rate it 5 stars, make pretty aesthetics posts w/it on Instagram & invite the author to talk about this book
without any critical depth or challenge. so don't say "read the room" about a republican MMC & use current events to support that outrage when that woman deployed a centuries-old racist stereotype in 2020 and you helped her.
