“When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader. A reader like this is used to the practice of reading being one that may performatively challenge them, much the way a safari guides a tourist through the “wilderness”—but ultimately always prioritizes their comfort and understanding.” ReadingDiversity Book:How to Read Now Source: How to Read Now
“[T]he idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics—the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling—and the stunted readership it demands—asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal.” ReadingCritical Reading Book:How to Read Now Source: How to Read Now
“When artists bemoan the rise of political correctness in our cultural discourse, what they’re really bemoaning is the rise of this unexpected reader. They’re bemoaning the arrival of someone who does not read them the way they expect—often demand—to be read; often someone who has been framed in their work and in their lives as an object, not as a subject.” ReadingDecolonization Book:How to Read Now Source: How to Read Now
“I realize now that being an unexpected reader has turned out to be the most valuable gift of my intellectual life. The fact that I was an unexpected reader—an interloper, in so many worlds—meant that I was very rarely in any assumed complicity with a writer or the world she created. It meant that I was almost always lost, and always foreign, and always had to make my way through with the only tool I had: continuing to read.” ReadingDiversity And Inclusion Book:How to Read Now Source: How to Read Now