A few years ago, I started a project at my primary teaching institution centered on Banned Books Week. I invited my creative writing group, students in my classes, and colleagues to post pictures of themselves reading banned books. I then started taking photos of myself reading banned books to help generate conversations about these hidden histories. Some of the photos were thoughtful, some funny. Most of them included stories about how a specific book shaped me, in good ways or bad, or explained why even deeply problematic books need to be read and understood so we don’t perpetuate trauma, either intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes it was just because the reason a book was banned was, frankly, bananas.
I provided context to each book: Why was it banned? How ethical were the reasons for banning that book? While I’m against banning books in general, I do think there is a real difference between wanting to ban Lord of the Rings because it promotes tobacco use and wanting to ban Huckleberry Finn for its racial stereotypes and questions about the text’s inherent racism. I don’t think either should be banned, but I do understand why questions of racism in Mark Twain’s book need to be taken seriously, and framed and addressed in a way that is more meaningful than what a basic American lit class typically offers.
This project was meant to get communities to think beyond the simplistic and reductive ways history and literature are presented in popular culture. We also explored how Banned Books Week is likewise a more complicated event than we’d like to think (you can read more about why here). I wanted to move the conversation of difficult texts away from binary extremes like “book banning is always bad” versus “banning books is necessary to protect the tender souls of our children.” Instead, we explored how banning books can be another way of sweeping awkward conversations and uncomfortable legacies under the table.
What we should be doing, instead of banning things that make us uncomfortable or challenge our understanding of the world, is to create a safe, joyful space to explore these texts and the culture of eraser surrounding them so we can be more informed, conscious consumers of stories, histories, and media in general. Together, my students and I laughed at the stories we loved and the bonkers reasons they were banned—and cringed at the hidden histories behind some beloved stories, while also gently exploring what those revelations meant to use now, how they might reshape our relationship to those stories. We learned, we laughed, we had fun exploring these issues without judgment.
I was more interested, in other words, in thinking about why something was banned, what it told us about the text, the social and historical context, and our own relationships to that information than any sense of righteous morality surrounding the issue meant to shame people for what they did or didn’t love or what they knew or didn’t know about a given book.
Gone with the Context
At one point, I tried to make this project go beyond my given campus and make it a community-wide event. We got official college photographers involved and had a formal photoshoot. They took pictures of me, students, and employees gathered around chatting and smiling while holding banned books from the campus library. It looked like we were having a good time! And we were! We enjoyed a lively conversation about how deeply uncomfortable it can be to look at the hidden histories of most famous books. But it also looked like we were endorsing the content of all the books we were reading—which ended up being a huge problem.
The pictures were originally posted to the institution’s social media accounts with simple phrases that celebrated Banned Books Week without any of the context about why it’s important to read banned books and why you don’t have to agree with or like the content of something in order to meaningfully engage with it. I later decided, because of this framing issue, that I didn’t want to make my Banned Books Week celebration bigger than what I could comfortably manage on my own, so as to better control the messaging (reading doesn’t not equal endorsement).
A year or so later, an image of me from that photoshoot resurfaced on my institution’s social media accounts. It featured me smiling broadly while holding a copy of Gone with the Wind. You can see where this is going. A random photo made it look like I was celebrating a racist book.
This image of me was used out of context and without my permission to promote, of all things, National Poetry Month in the spring of 2021 (but that’s another story entirely). Within the hour of that image being posted (and subsequently removed), I found myself in the unenviable position of having to explain myself and my beliefs for something that didn’t actually have anything to do with me, simply because it was my face in the photo.
Scandal ensued. I wrote up a response about the actual context of this image and also posted a joking/not joking example of how easy it is to take images out of context. There were meetings. There were letters written and responded to. I was promised that those photos would never see the light again without my explicit permission (so, like, never). The institution apologized and published an interview with me so I could showcase what I actually stand for. The social media department promised to make important changes, including removing old images from their stockpile and tightening up their consent-form policy, not to mention developing better social media presentations and framing, along with a tighter editorial process that would have stopped that random image from being posted in the first place.
The whole situation was stressful, particularly in the middle of a pandemic when racial violence and hate crimes regularly made front-page news and higher ed institutions were having to deal with the very real fact that they aren’t as inclusive or progressive as they like to think they are. That’s not to say racial inequality didn’t exist in these extremes before, by the way—the pandemic just made it more visible, particularly for (white) people who hadn't had to directly confront the depth of our country’s racism.
It was also happening at a time when I was feeling particularly burned out, undervalued, and questioning whether it was worth pursuing my more radical projects, like decolonizing our outdated literature classes, when there was so little systemic support. Everything was an uphill battle. The photo debacle was like a final slap in the face, not just to me, but to the institution’s BIPOC community more generally.
But I stand by what I told the people involved in that situation as we worked to resolve it: I get it, mistakes happen, what I care about is what we do moving forward. How can we use this situation to do better in the future? Nobody in this world is perfect. Bureaucracies complicate things even more. But if we’re going to grow together as a community, we need to leave room for productive conversations that lead to meaningful, concrete change when these things happen.
Uncomfortable Personal Histories
Skip forward six months, to September 2021. A week before the next National Banned Books Week, wondering if I should even bother trying to resurrect this celebration. Do I have the energy? Do I even care? Some of the joy of this project has been lost because of that situation.
I did what I always do in these situations and went to my bookshelf for comfort and advice. I like to pick random books, flip open and page, and see what synchronous wisdom comes to me by way of the written word. I picked up my first book, Everyday Enchantments, probably because I knew my second book from that publisher would be out in a week. So much had changed for me in the early years of my writing that it's often a comfort to look back and see how far I’ve come.
I flipped open the book to the essay called “A Trip to the Bookstore.” It was a soothing read about the many times I’ve gone into a used bookstore for wisdom, advice, and comfort of books. It focused on one particular outing where I found a stash of wonderfully outrageous pulp books which I collect simply for their covers and over-the-top plots (again, not an endorsement of all the content within those books).
I was finishing up a section on one of my favorite literary weaknesses, cookbooks based on famous stories, like The Nero Wolf Cookbook, based on Rex Stout’s iconic sleuth, when I saw it: Gone with the Wind. My heart stopped. I reread the passage a few times, then paused to think about what I’d stumbled upon.
It read, in reference to a stash of epic pulp books I’d found, “Yes, you must have these. And the Gone with the Wind Cookbook, too, for much the same reasons as you need your swashbuckling pair pulp adventure, for the cover and the idea more than the story or a recipe for classic Southern grits” (DeBlassie 113).
Well, now. That was a doozy of a sentence. And a whole host of feelings ran through me the moment I read it, ranging from fuuuuuuuuucccckkkkk to oh, the irony…
I couldn’t believe I wrote that. I still can’t. While it’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement of a racist book (I focus on “the cover and the idea more than the story”), I still have to reckon with the fact that intent—celebrating pulp and genre fiction—don’t necessarily matter when it comes to how something lands to readers. In other words, when I wrote that line all those years ago, I wasn’t thinking about the racism of Gone with the Wind. I was thinking about the iconic romance, which is pretty much all I knew about the book at the time. But that doesn’t mean that what I wrote can’t still be read as problematic.
Looking back, I find it hugely ironic that this book—one I’d spent very little time thinking about up until last spring—ended up making it into my first book and that I didn’t even register that fact until after I’d had to publicly and explicitly distance myself from that story. Never in a million years would I have thought to find a line like that in one of my books. It was double surprising—and this is perhaps beside the point—because I wasn’t ever a huge fan of Gone with the Wind.
Now here’s the other interesting thing: I’d completely forgotten about that line. Completely forgotten that I’d ever included that book in that essay. Why would I? I purchased the book, stuck it in my cookbook collection, and never looked at it again until I Marie Kondo-d my bookshelves a few years back, getting rid of old graduate school dust-collectors, books that I hated, books I’d never read, and, sometimes, books that had bad memories, or that with which I had no real relationship. The Gone with the Wind Cookbook was one of those books.
Cooking up Trouble
I remember the day I bought that book years ago, as it marked a turning point, a small moment where I started to think about what I could do with my doctorate (it was, in fact, a sign that I was recovering and beginning to move on from the terrors of graduate school). I remember picking up that cookbook because I liked to collect pulp fiction, literary cookbooks, and (in)famous, if problematic stories, including books like The Sheik, an iconic and deeply racist and othering romance that is, nevertheless, an important artifact in the history of the romance novel—and one that was also made into a movie like Gone with the Wind.
This was before I’d started seriously reading romance or digging deeply into pop culture criticism or undoing historical erasure central to our limited understanding of the literary canon. But I was getting there—curious about history, particularly of the history of genre fiction, that is consistently erased, hidden, and otherwise diminished in the face of High Art and Literary Fiction. I was also getting more curious about how we distance ourselves from or outright ignore uncomfortable histories so we don’t ever directly have to face them.
I was likewise pushing back hard against an academic elitism that had been telling me for the past ten years what I was and wasn’t allowed to like, what I was and wasn’t allowed to take seriously, what I could and couldn’t enjoy, what thoughts were and weren't correct to have. That meant that I was also being very flip about things I didn’t know enough about like Gone with the Wind, a book which I’d never read, and a movie I’d only sort of remembered from my youth. I had a vague awareness that there were problems with the book and the movie based on it, in the same way that stories only centering white Southerners always made me vaguely uncomfortable. But I didn’t explore that discomfort until later.
At that time, I knew it as the sweeping technicolor romance, the kind of thing that would make Serious Academics roll their eyes. So naturally, in my resistance to that culture, I ran headlong in the other direction, for better or worse—realistically, for better and worse.
Still, it was one of the first books to go in my massive book-cleanse. By that time, I’d learned more about its racist context, thanks to my Banned Books Week project, and decided I didn’t want that as part of my literary cookbook collection. To be clear: I’m not a saint. I’ve kept plenty of problematic books. I have my H.P. Lovecraft books and my Anais Nin collection, my old pulp westerns, and more bodice rippers than polite society is likely comfortable with.
I enjoyed these books—still do—for their pulp covers (the idea of the thing, as I said in Everyday Enchantments) and, sometimes, their stories. But I didn’t ever think they weren’t problematic. H.P. Lovecraft is both a terrible racist and the father of cosmic horror: two truths can coexist. Anais Nin was both a feminist sex-positive revelation and also wrote stories that eroticized pedophilia. So I keep these books on my bookshelves, even now, not because I’m comfortable with everything they embody, but because they have meaning to me in some way.
I also don’t want to pretend, as can be so fashionable now, that these books and authors haven’t shaped me in meaningful, and yes, sometimes problematic ways. So when it came to getting rid of the Gone with the Wind cookbook, it wasn’t necessarily for intellectually or morally virtuous reasons. Sure, it was because I didn’t like the way the racism of the iconic book wasn’t ever really unpacked in more visible ways in pop culture (until you went down the research rabbit hole), but I also never had a special affinity for Gone with the Wind, which was why I was so surprised that I bothered to include it in my first book. There’s plenty of other problematic stories, in other words, that I could have included, and be perfectly comfortable unpacking why I chose to do so.
Went with the Wind
Here’s what popular culture teaches us about that book: It’s about the 1939 movie. Here’s what popular culture teaches us about the movie: It’s about Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler. It’s about technicolor. It’s about resilience and romance and academy awards. It’s about bad Pride & Prejudice remixes of the movie starting Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy circa 1940. This story has been reduced to a soundbite, a clip, a few famous lines, an image of a glamorous past, and, as it does so, it completely erases what it’s also about: racism.
I haven’t watched Gone with the Wind in over twenty years. I have no doubt I would see it every differently than from when I was a wee tween. In fact, the only thing I really remember clearly from the movie, aside from the iconic final scene, is the scene where Scarlet O’Hara repurposes her curtains to make a fancy dress. More specifically, I remember Carol Burnett’s 1976 spoof on that moment, “Went with the Wind!” That’s how pulp-culture works: a book gets reduced to a scene in a movie that gets passed down, made fun of, and mass-disseminated. Outside of that one specific image, we lose out on the complexity—and the problems—of the original text.
This is literarily the whole reason why I started delving into the murky waters of banned books with my students. We needed to safely explore the tremendous historical erasure behind problematic texts, question our own complicity in the perpetuation of these narratives, become more critical consumers, and more thoughtful producers of stories. Regardless of what academia and liberal intellectual social media make people think, not everyone is always thinking critically about what we consume when we consume it, including me. In fact, a very small number of people stop to consider the real story behind the one popular culture, the literary canon, or mainstream history sell us.
And that’s exactly what the line in my book reflects: the sweeping romance soundbite of Gone with the Wind that made its home in mainstream culture, not the realities of the book itself. I chose it for the campy cover and the romantic idea of the thing, I said, not the actual content. But the problematic content is there. It’s real. And it can have a real-world traumatic impact on black communities.
This is something I teach my students in my genre classes now, particularly in my historical romance class, as we wrap up a unit on old-school bodice rippers and clinch covers. The covers are a revelation, a celebration of stories centered on feelings and sexuality and joy. Inside many of those books, however, are also uncomfortable narratives about rape (sometimes euphemistically framed as “forced seduction,” sometimes not), violence against women, Orientalism, racism, and xenophobia, not to mention a bunch of other terrible -isms. The same goes for my beloved occult detective genre, which I also teach a course on. Within fantastical stories about monster hunters, haunted haunted houses, and murder-solving psychics, there’s also a history of racism, Orientalism, homophobia…you get the idea. We can’t look at these stories without unpacking their complicated histories—and we can’t look away either. We have to situate them in their historical context, appreciate what, if anything, is there to appreciate (it’s on a text by text basis), and also not shy away from the deeply uncomfortable aspects of those stories.
Now it wasn’t my intention to be hurtful in my reductive—and celebratory—depiction of the Gone with the Wind Cookbook in my first book. I simply hadn’t been aware enough to understand the full implications of that line. I didn’t know. But it’s also important to recognize that it’s not always about intention. It’s about how it lands.
I am absolutely certain, for example, that my college didn’t intend to promote harmful narratives in the photo they posted or make me complicit in that, but that wasn’t how it landed. So here I am, grappling with the fact that, for all I rejected that book’s messaging in that college-wide social media debacle, I did, at one point, seemingly promote the offensive content of that book—or at least ignore its existence—without the “help” of that institution.
The Illusion of Liberal Perfection
So why am I sharing all this with you?
On the one hand, reading that excerpt of my book synchronously when I did was a very good thing. It puts a lot into perspective: where I’ve been, how I’ve grown, how I want to keep growing. I’ve learned how to take my playful energy and resistance to Old School Academia and channel it in positive ways, like teaching students how to analyze media and explore their relationship to that complicated media, rather than telling them what they should think or feel about what they consume. I’ve also learned how to curb the destructive side of that impulse—I’m no longer flip about what I don’t know. In fact, I know enough about a handful of topics to know just how little I know (say that three times fast). In other words, the more you learn, the more you realize that you have even more to learn. Which is as it should be—I never what to start thinking that I have all the answers or all the facts about anything.
I hope that I continue to grow and can look back at my old work and marvel at my progress (and, yes, sometimes cringe and this or that)—maybe even admire the things that stand the test of time. In the same way that I look back at my ten-year-old dissertation and cringe at some of the assertions that made me feel very smart at the time, I don’t ever want to look back on my writing and think it’s pure brilliance—some of it was, actually, but a lot wasn’t. What I thought was radical and thought-provoking ten or even five years ago should look dated as I’ve allowed myself to be shaped by new information, experiences, and conversations.
On the other hand, we’re dealing with other strange components here that complicate things: the paper trail and the ephemeral threat of cancel culture on social media, which Anne Applebaum in a recent article in The Atlantic framed as the new Puritanism. Don't get me wrong. I’m not freaked out by the idea that pitchfork-wielding folks will come to burn me at the stake for something I wrote years ago. I don’t think cancel culture is a thing so much as call-out culture—more on that in a minute. The fact is, if you’ve been writing or creating for any length of time and posting it on the internet, people will find your outdated ideas. And, yes, we all have outdated ideas—just not everyone has an internet or published record of them.
Here’s another fact: As a professor and writer (and, yes, bruja), I’m always thinking about how an audience might perceive me—it’s impossible not to. I want to be open and honest about how I’ve grown, simply because I don’t think anyone is born “woke” and I’m leery of anyone who acts like they have all the answers to inclusivity, representation, diversity, ending systemic oppression…all the important stuff. That sanctimonious pseudo-liberalism is the thing that drove me away from academia in the first place—and, dare I say, uncritically into the arms of Gone with the Wind. I don’t trust it and I think it’s a great way to hide behind progressive rhetoric while reinforcing systemic oppression.
I tell my creative writing students that my website is littered with good, bad, terrible, and brilliant writing. I didn’t edit out my false starts and early experiments, my bad recipe photos, or so-so posts. If I did, it would see the illusion that artists are born experts in their craft, when, really, everything we do is messy at first. But keeping that mess up also leaves me open to a good roasting. This is also, quite honestly, at the back of my mind.
I know bad first drafts aren’t the same thing as unconsciously or unknowingly endorsing problematic materials. But those drafts also document the process of becoming a more informed, humane, and ethical human. I’m one-hundred percent sure that, if I keep digging, I will find other things that don’t land well now—and maybe didn’t when I wrote them. It’s just that now, I have a more informed perspective.
Here’s another uncomfortable truth: There was a fleeting moment when I read that passage of my book that someone, somewhere, will likely see the social media post I had to make about the photo of me reading Gone with the Wind where I wholeheartedly rejected that book and everything it stood for. That same person might pick up Everyday Enchantments, read the offending passage, and think hypocrite or, more generously, the plot thickens. These are the thoughts that kept me up that night, not just the ones about my own growth.
Hey, I’m only human, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say exposing these messy parts of myself made me nervous. As any professor will tell you, you can teach your heart out and still get that one student who takes a vicious glee in skewering you in your evals for one issue simply because they were in a bad mood that day or for some other reason that makes them feel like they have permission to take their anger out on you. Then there are the book reviewers who are upset that your book isn’t a love story but a scary story and their review is all about how they hate what you write because they hate scary stories and really only want to read love stories. Or the people who struggle to create themselves, and so delight in pointing out every mistake from us creators.
These are also the type of people who will troll the internet looking for something to nail you on, a small something to cherry-pick out of context, or in some cases, something that is a real issue but not with the intention to address in a meaningful and constructive way. Now, they aren’t everybody, but that one negative voice can make you feel like everyone is talking badly about you. In reality, sometimes they’re just the loudest voice or the one we fixate on because of our own impostor syndrome.
I can’t tell you how many Twitter dumpster fires I walked into where someone is being roasted for [insert random thing here]. Some of the issues need to be addressed, absolutely, although I’m not sure Twitter is the place for a nuanced or meaningful conversation. Sometimes it is, as it can be used in strategic ways to hold people accountable, like the firestorm that hit the Romance Writers of America earlier this year after they gave an award to an inspirational romance that featured Indigenous genocide. This is after years of RWA promising to do better and continuing to perpetuate racist rhetoric and behavior. They rescinded the award, and rightly so, after this visible outcry.
Still, other issues are products of a medium that encourages virality: threads and soundbites are taken so far out of context they aren’t even recognizable anymore. Some are just people being argumentative (You like apples? But what about oranges? How dare you leave them out!). It’s not always a healthy space, nor a productive one. It’s anxiety-inducing to the point where you can start second-guessing everything you’ve ever done that might have ended up on the internet. It likewise conflates different issues: real problems like an institution awarding a book that endorses Indigenous genocide, people’s histories of growth, and the old apples versus oranges argument. These all are given the same level of importance in call-out culture rather than treated as three very different things. More importantly, it doesn’t leave room for productive growth or meaningful conversations—or the recognition that people can and do grow beyond statements they made in the past.
Getting Over Always Getting It Right
The intensity of these past two pandemic years seemed to feed this growing frenzy of call-out culture. And, lest I sound like I’m about to dive into a hysterical diatribe about the evils of cancel culture, I’ll leave you, instead, with two very thoughtful podcasts that unpack the phenomenon’s good parts (holding people in power accountable) and bad (shutting down productive conversations, instilling fear in creators of having every mistake they made back up on them). You’re Wrong About Podcast takes a deep dive into all the things related to cancel culture, while Nerdette Podcast takes a micro-look at what it means when creators get called out about old ideas they might not actually believe in anymore, but that are still floating around the internet.
To be clear, we can and should have productive conversations about how we can all do better. But that’s so often not what these things are doing. And here’s the thing: It’s really easy to call out what someone else did wrong. In class. On the internet. In a book. In life. But it’s a lot harder to direct your gaze to yourself, the moments where you fell short, the times where you didn’t know enough to know that what you wrote/said/did was not in alignment with your personal values—or at a time when your personal values weren’t what they are today.
It’s uncomfortable, which is what makes calling out others so easy and vindicating: You have the right values, you would have said/done the right thing in that situation. But that’s not always productive activism, as former President Obama explained in 2019, at least not when the action stops with the tweet.
Isn’t that the very behavior that I’d been feeling so tired of this past year? Isn’t that what is contributing to academic burn-out, being surrounded by people who have all the “right values” but never take a step back to consider how their behavior or unconscious bias makes BIPOC faculty feel so isolated and undervalued?
Academics and liberal intellectuals post their Black Lives Matter images and generally support anti-racism agendas at higher ed institutions. But how often, at the individual and institutional level, do those beliefs move beyond the performative? In order to have meaningful change, we have to sit with the discomfort of how we are products of systemic racism and contribute to it in small and large ways. We have to refuse to sweep uncomfortable histories and topics under the table. Otherwise, we just perpetuate social injustice.
Here’s what we miss out on when we polarize social justice issues or use our own liberal values to shield ourselves from these difficult conversations: actual, meaningful, productive growth for individuals and for communities. These are the conversations we should be creating space for. Nobody is going to get it right all of the time. That’s a terrible, unproductive burden to place on people. A kind of burden that shuts down conversations and turns people against each other so they don’t have to be the one that’s being called out.
Social justice isn’t, and never should be, about perfection. It should be about progress.
And, yes, I know there are people in the world who can’t or won’t grow—white-supremacists, bigots, and conspiracy theorists, the likes of which who have made these past two years even more difficult on everyone, simply because “their rights” and “their beliefs” matter more to them than anything else. But I’m speaking here about those of us who do want to grow, to understand, to be more empathetic and humane individuals. There are more of us out there than the drama-hungry media likes to portray. Again, this collective anxiety has been reduced to a soundbite of violence and struggle—but that’s not all that is happening here. We also have people deepening their relationship to community, to accountability, to meaningful, sustainable change.
But in order to make that lasting impact, we need to release ourselves from the burden of having unblemished histories and think more seriously about how we can use those histories for a better future. We need to get over always getting it right.
Joyful & Generative Activism
As for me, I’m not sure where to go from here. Maybe my publishers will let me edit out that line, maybe they won’t. But I’m also uncomfortable with that idea of erasure. In the same way that HBO recently reissued Gone with the Wind with an introductory video explaining the context and controversy of this movie in a post-2020 world, I don’t want to pretend what I wrote didn’t happen. For one thing, there are plenty of copies of my first book floating around with that line in it. For another, removing something doesn’t remove the potential damage.
Maybe the right thing to do is to keep it as a record of growth in a world that is becoming more and more consumed with having the “right” answers, ideals, and products to the point that it can be terrifying to commit ideas to paper (or the internet). It’s why academics don’t finish their dissertation, authors struggle to write the next book, or artists give up on the act of creation period. It’s also why people get automatically defensive when someone (hopefully kindly) points out their outdated or harmful beliefs.
All the same, I wrote a whole article about this experience because I felt it needed to be addressed, as did the fear of getting something wrong and seeing a past version of yourself in a different light. You might think this is an awful lot of space for one line about one book in another book. In fact, some people will think I’m making something out of nothing. Others will think I haven’t done enough to address the issue. Still others are thinking, “Gone with the Wind is racist? Hmm…didn’t know that.”
For me, this issue is more far-reaching than any one book or author. When we make these conversations more mainstream, it’s less likely that someone will primarily associate Gone with the Wind with sweeping romance rather than racism. We can explore celebrated authors like Roald Dahl and unpack his very real antisemitism which shaped many of his stories like The Witches (both the book and the movie it was based on). We can recognize that once beloved children’s series like The Little House on the Prairie contributed to the erasure and villainization of Indigenous communities. We can appreciate that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a groundbreaking feminist show for its time, but also that we need to move beyond white feminism and the cult of Joss Whedon. We can also develop a language, a framework, for understanding these problematic texts and authors, in a way that promotes curiosity and exploration, rather than censor for what we don’t know, what we’ve enjoyed or appreciated, for what we’ve consumed without thought.
We can begin to develop a more collaborative space where we can learn from one another’s various backgrounds and experiences to inform our own worldview. There are things I don’t know about which I’m beginning to educate myself on. In the same way, I don’t expect all people to have a working knowledge of the cultural and historical frameworks of the mestizaje in the American Southwest—I don’t even know all of it, just my small slice of the experience. And even there, I’m only just now learning how to unpack and articulate that experience, given the histories of cultural assimilation and erasure that silence complicated conversations about our histories of colonization. But I’m willing to share that experience when others stumble learning a new social literacy, just as I appreciate learning from other people with lived experience outside my own.
No, I haven’t gotten it right all the time and won’t, moving forward. It’s foolish to pretend otherwise. Nobody will, and it is unproductive to frame social justice that way. Doing so reduces activism to performativity, rather than meaningful change. In fact, there are probably a hundred things about this very essay I’ll want to change a month or a year from now, but I still needed to write and post it. I’m all about joyful problematization, or learning to unpack complex stories, ideologies, and, yes, personal perspectives and histories, in a way that is generative and positive, rather than hostile and silencing. This is what I teach in my classes and with my Banned Books Week project. That’s what I’m exploring here on The Bruja Professor. It’s what I’m trying to foster more of in my various communities. As I tell my students, there’s no such thing as an unproblematic text. Nothing is perfect in this world.
Not even my books.
And there’s no such thing as perfect allyship. Perfection is toxic. It’s the tool of white supremacy that silences growth. So why not choose meaningful, generative conversation? Why not choose progress over perfection?
That’s what real activism looks like.
