THIS IS A PERFECT ILLUSTRATION OF SEVERAL SYSTEMATIC RACISM-FUELED FAILURES HAPPENING ALL AT ONCE. Allow me to explain:
Black people are statistically more likely to get rejected by banks for loans for homes and businesses = less black owned businesses, including book stores.
revealnews.org/article/for-pe…
revealnews.org/article/for-pe…
Black authors are less likely to be published for SEVERAL reasons including #publishingsowhite = less black-authored books. Also see:
Black people have been dying at the hands of the police/the system for hundreds of years but nonblack people are clueless about how to dismantle racism (because they've been benefitting from racist systems their whole lives) and most are only just realizing they should try.
Because of #whiteprivilege, they're entitled af, and feel like their needs are more important than everything else (BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE SYSTEM HAS TAUGHT THEM). They are ungrateful and impatient because they've never had to wait.
Black people, on the other hand, have been taught to be grateful for ANYTHING because we "deserved" nothing. medium.com/@SamMcKenzieJr…
(We been waiting for our whole damn lives for this racist shit to change, let alone to get a book we ordered.)
(We been waiting for our whole damn lives for this racist shit to change, let alone to get a book we ordered.)
We were told to wait, to be quiet, to be grateful. So if we did by some miracle get an opportunity (like a book deal) we were grateful for whatever money we got for our work, even if it wasn't fair. See: #publishingpaidme
If someone patronized our store, we were grateful they chose to shop at a black owned business even though our business are denied loans and are systematically pushed out of our own neighborhoods on the regular. #gentrification
You want to know what we mean when we say black people can't be racist because racism is A SYSTEM of oppression? Why we 'play the race card'? This is the kind shit we're talking about:
Not being paid fairly for our work.
Not being given equal opportunities.
Not being allowed to own or flourish or publish or LIVE.
And if BY SOME MIRACLE we are one of the lucky few who make it through all the booby traps set for us, we have shit like this to look forward to:
Not being given equal opportunities.
Not being allowed to own or flourish or publish or LIVE.
And if BY SOME MIRACLE we are one of the lucky few who make it through all the booby traps set for us, we have shit like this to look forward to:
Entitled people pissed because they're "trying to help us" and we're "ungrateful".
Now we're "bad at our jobs" because of a system that made these black owned bookstores and the VERY FEW black authored books inside them virtually invisible to the whole damn country until a man's neck was kneeled on for 8 minutes until he died.
And only because people were stuck at home and literally COULDN'T look away because of a global pandemic did they even decide to care enough to order a few fucking books.
In conclusion: Fuck you for canceling your order of a book that's been out for years that you just heard about from a store you just discovered a few days ago.
Fuck the system. And racism. And white supremacy.
And fuck the police too.
Fuck the system. And racism. And white supremacy.
And fuck the police too.
I just realized I didn't even touch on the fact that these books aren't just sold out, they're literally having to be reprinted, and what that says about publisher expectation and (the lack of) support for black authored books, but I'm tired.
