so. A DEADLY EDUCATION is a book full of racist microaggressions and also one egregiously racist comment about dreadlocks, and i think that's something that white readers of novik need to confront

i would describe myself as a fan of novik's work! this was not a book that i was like, hanging out to trash, although i wasn't excited about it for other reasons (the straightwashing of her own drarry fanfiction lol)

but the experience of watching two friends liveread this book in the last 24 hours was just this tsunami of misunderstandings about cultures and languages and things that are easily google-able but somehow weren't

the optics of calling your half-indian character 'galadriel higgins' and killing off her indian dad, and she doesn't wash, and the school has a library aisle of 'all the indian languages' (all 800 of them?) and the blithe association of djinn (an islamic thing) with hinduism

the failure to understand how mandarin works, how chinese names work - a friend spent all day trying to figure out if novik knows whether or not Liu is a first or last name (it's family name, but the character Liu is the only character consistently referred to by her family name)

the DREADLOCKS THING which i absolutely cannot (and should not!!) fucking move past because it's so goddamn awful

the thing is that none of these (well. other than the dreadlocks which i can't BELIEVE WAS MISSED LMFAO) stand out on their own as particularly egregious, but when viewed as a part of the overall whole, it's just a fucking mess of racism

and it's racism in a way that white people aren't attuned to. it's racism in a way that a white publishing industry will miss while readers of colour go through the book with increasingly gritted teeth

and i don't tweet because i wanna be like I'M THE GOOD WHITE PERSON WHO NOTICED, i tweet because i want to support friends who are hurt by this shit and bc i know that white people will listen to other white people more, and it's necessary for white people to call this shit out

and i think that white people need to like. address this within themselves! if you wanna be Woke then fucking wake up to the fact that white people are re-enacting colonialism as normal all the goddamn time and we need to like, take notice

and if you missed it the first time when you read this book, take note. acknowledge that you missed it, acknowledge that the shit in the book is fucked up, support your friends who are poc and are hurt by this nonsense

it's 2020 and the world is in turmoil amidst a tidal wave of racial injustice and it is absolutely incumbent on us as beneficiaries of the status quo to swallow the discomfort that comes with having liked something that is kind of shitty actually

of PRODUCING something that is kind of shitty, actually. the discomfort of fucking up is fuck all in comparison to the discomfort, pain, agony of actually experiencing racism & we need to face that!

tell your friends of colour that you're listening to their pain and that you support them, pay attention to the media you are consuming even if it's by people you like and who have not been a problem in the past, pay attention to the work you are producing

it's not hard to learn about common microaggressions (HAIR IS A BIG ONE! CLEANLINESS IS A BIG ONE!!!!), it's not hard to do research, it's not hard to listen to people of colour who are talking about this stuff for free, literally everywhere, because it's their whole lives

anyway please read this review (not by me!) which covers all of this in far better detail https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3585134911

in particular:

also i wanna quickly apologise for my own use of the term dreadlocks in this thread, it's come to my attention that the preferred term is locs