Why We Stopped Reading White Folk: An Introduction to the Hive’s Curation

We are voracious readers with appetites learned from our parents. We held witness as they consumed novels at alarming rates, using texts as bibles leading the way toward American invisibility, which is to say, a pathway to melt into the American background as opposed to the hypervisibility their foreign faces afforded them as they navigated landscapes so unlike the ones they’ve left behind and have begun, it seemed to us, to forget — whether this scattering of memory was intentional or not remains mystery to us.

They utilized books to learn what they did not know and what they hoped to one day become. The books, in truth, became escape routes to place themselves into the worlds they wished to be in but were not yet accepted within. The books allowed our parents, for a stolen hour or three or as nightly ritual, to evade the drudgery of survival as migrants with ceilings so impossibly low, they could not help but dream of the seven generations later when their labor would matter.

We are profoundly grateful for our parents instilling in us the importance of story. This said, though we are grateful for the readers they created in us, we reject the teachings they believed we needed to be taught. In no world do we desire to melt into whiteness. In no world do we reject the spectrum of color from which we stemmed. In no world to which we wish to belong are narratives written from and for the white perspective alone.

Origin Story: A Pervasive Narrative We Rip from this Body

When we were young, all that we read were white narratives — recommended by our parents, enforced by our schools, offered by our libraries, and glossed and shining in our bookstores. These narratives were of white folks writing their experiences into the tomes from which others would utilize to define the American landscape, experience, and identity.

Through childhood and teenagehood, it was whiteness and the story of whiteness as far as our eyes could see. We were cast, repeatedly, into oceans of story in which protagonists and heroes were not and never brown like us, migrant like us, poor like us, multi-tongued or confused like us. These stories whispered to our ears: become this — aspire to be these girls and aspire to one day marry these boys. Leave everything, absolutely everything that is yourself and makes yourself, behind. And the adults around us only confirmed this truth.

We were manipulated into believing that white stories mattered and that ours did not. This was compounded by our environment: a town forgotten, overshadowed by the state prison, lost within a community going absolutely nowhere fast. We were black and brown, stagnant and lacking, lost and forgotten; the children and mothers lurking years away in proximity to fathers, brothers, sons, and cousins barred behind concrete walls.

Imagine what narratives we have been told about ourselves. Now, imagine what stories we have been told about you. The messaging was so clear and well done that, for years, we believed them to be true. And, it must be said, we really tried. We tried to erase ourselves and we strove to become what we should have known we never could be. It was a course deranged, all of us groomed toward a definitive failure from its onset.

Continuation: The Story Does Not Get Better

Somehow (we really don’t know how; we just knew innately that we owed it to our parents to work, without break, without breath, without rest), we made it into public-ivy university. Our parent’s labor (and wishing and pressuring) manifested in accelerated generational success — our trajectories, since birth, dip-dyed in the staved off dreams of our elders who had come before. We wore these truths as weights upon our shoulders, accustomed to the suffocating pressure to fix all that had been lost, had been yearned for, and had been dreamed.

In truth, we did not begin so bitter. We were, foolish as we know it to be now, excited. We thought things would be different; everything rife with possibility and change. However, it did not. The English Department was steeped in overt Judeo-Christian narrative with overwhelmingly Eurocentric and Western overtones utilized to define the American canon that long ago ceased to match its landscape. Ethnic Literature was a one-off elective class taught once or twice the academic year, which all of Asian, Chicano, and Africana literature were crushed into week long coverage. And, Indigenous Literature was not even on the table yet. How could it be? The whole of the department was as white as the stories we were forced to consume.

Matching that landscape was Barnes & Nobles and Borders stuffing “Cultural Literature” onto one shelf as if its cultural component rendered it unfit to be part of the larger Fiction section. There is no lie here. In all the sea of books these big box stores could offer, one shelf dedicated for Cultural Literature? Our university, we understood, modeled what the rest of the world had already affirmed: white narratives matter; white narratives define us; white narratives sell; and the rest? The rest could go to hell (sorry, that rhymes and, honestly, the sentiment still fits).

Graduate School — The Creation of Positive Resistance

Then, we entered graduate school in a program touting social justice and diversity (ah, how we hate the emptiness of these words). Yet, again, we were met with a majority white faculty. What made it justice oriented? What made it diverse? The answer: two queer identifying faculty members and exactly one Black professor. We must clap our hands. They have done their job. In hindsight, we really don’t know why we had such high hopes.

We’ll stop being snarky for a moment — we can def talk about the positive resistance these experiences created. Halfway through the program, working on a manuscript on resilience in time of war, we had a moment, an epiphany if you will. We were recommended a plethora of literature covering the European and American lens on multi-war fronts; this, despite our advisor knowing our work covered indigenous resistance. We looked at him and said this: “we’d like to choose our books for this.”

In that moment, we concretely realized three things: 1) we were going to put a halt on white writers and their narratives; 2) we were going to read BIPOC work exclusively; and 3) we were going to sustain this practice as long as it was needed.

Over Five Years Later: An Update on Reading Practice

Obviously, we’ve long since graduated; but, that pivotal moment never left us. It’s been over five years, and we still have not picked up a single white writer (honestly, a fairly herculean task, if you think about it). At the time, the choice was needed to reorient just who gets to be centered in our experiences. Beyond analyzing our proximity to whiteness as a defining feature to our social identity and position, the choice further was a reclaiming of this body that has had heteronormative whiteness stuffed down its throat for a quarter of a century despite growing up in a black and brown community. Whiteness is pervasive here. It lurks in all the oppressive colonialist ways both blatantly clear and silently nebulous, reminding us of the power structures of this world and how we were not meant to have a place within those structures.

We’re certainly aware that there is great and amazing work coming out of the white pipeline. After twenty years of forced and groomed reading, there’s more than ample proof of this. We wouldn’t dare contest this truth, so it’s important to be clear that we didn’t stop reading white folks because their work is trash. We stopped reading because there are equally outstanding BIPOC work out there too. Golden, redemptive, healing work, and I bet you everything that no matter how great the work is, it doesn’t have the visibility or readership that the work of great white writers do.

We are interested in what happens to the mind with twenty years of BIPOC narrative consumption. How does it decolonize, reorient, or imagine positioning with the world, one’s worldview, or one’s potential and autonomy? We don’t know this answer yet, but we’re quite invested in it as a potential facet of the multi-structures needed to nurture and empower black and brown bodies.

Paalam & Looking Forward to the Pomegranate Hive

This said, we’ve opened a medium. We have a lot of reading recommendations from authors familiar and, most likely, unfamiliar. Times have changed, and there’s a growing visibility for BIPOC writers and their work — much of this because of the advocacy and solidarity of BIPOC communities lifting, supporting, and demanding justice for their own. We thank the white folk doing the work, but the reality is that the damn gate continues to be blocked and there’s a whole lot of you that need to be held accountable to that.

As a last note, we must mention that in our experiences as long-time readers, we have no interest in the glorified, egoistic practice of declaring what is high art, low art, or worthy of praise. We have hella spec and fantasy and manga and comic recommendations, fam, and in our time together, we’ll be calling shots on why genre has as much to offer as the literary, pending, of course, on the strength of creation.

So, hopefully looking forward //ingat ka.

Mabuhay, I’m EA Garcia, and I’m a thriving eater of story. I reflect on all my reads across genres, forms, and categories. Since I only read BIPOC work and prioritize small, indie, and micro press work, you might find a new read! I also write on academia, publishing, & decolonization, ftw.

Feel free to recommend things in the comments below! I LOVE recs: particularly books, dramas, manga, & webtoons! Try to keep it BIPOC and marginalized ❤

Read about WHY I only read BIPOC folk, get a taste for my stance on decolonizing bookshelves, or look at some funky reviews of storywork!