#23: Required Reading, Mandated Purchases
From the antiracism reading list, to the small business gift guide, 'must-buy' status is ubiquitous.
June was a difficult time. During the second major wave of the Black Lives Matter protests and movement, Blackness and anti-Blackness became hypervisible. It felt odd – ah, so it is possible to believe us about this? – but also deeply worrying, like the dot com bubble or the buy-to-let market. This attention simply could not hold.
Enter the antiracism reading list. Suddenly, there was an understandable charge from mainly white people to get abreast of the situation and underlying causes that leads to extrajudicial killings by the police, incarceration across both prisons and psychiatric facilities, and a lack of access to secure housing, clean air and water to affect Black people disproportionately across the diasporas in the way it currently does. But where to begin? Very quickly, a kind of canon emerged: I had never heard of Me and White Supremacy before, but perhaps I was not the target audience, while British texts like Akala’s Natives and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and its associated podcast, About Race, had a resurgence in the charts.
Clearly, I don’t have qualms with recommending things to strangers. But what was so noticeable about this list was that often the recommendation came without the thing I think is second-most valuable when telling someone about the work, after ‘what it’s about’: the flavour, or the texture of the thing. I walked around my Tesco Express the week I took a day off work because I was too overwhelmed with the sudden promise of change listening to the High Low podcast. That week, they recommended books and podcasts like they always do, but this time, it was just reeling off a list of names and titles that anyone would have found scrolling on Instagram. I had no idea why most of these things were the thing to read based on that, so how would I know which one to begin with? I’ve run out of free articles for the month so can’t re-read it, but for Vulture, Lauren Michele Jackson explored the question of what the anti-racist reading list is for. I complained about being set homework back in early June on my main newsletter also.
But beyond the category of ‘must-read’ or ‘must-listen,’ there has developed a more troubling layer: must buy. The press release for Otegha Uwagba’s then forthcoming essay on racism, WHITES, highlighted the death of George Floyd as the reason for bringing the publication forward, to the week of the US election. I listened to an excerpt of it on The High Low, already wary, if not queasy, at the cynicism the publicity campaign had demonstrated. While undoubtedly unpleasant, dealing with shire grads turned Hackney dwellers during post-work drinks felt far, far away from the nub of anti-Blackness and structural racism early June had ostensibly focussed on. I worry that we will see a greater push from the publishing industry to wrap up interesting perspectives into the format of black teachership, but what if you don’t want the word ‘ally’ in your title or subtitle? Over the summer, while tv companies suddenly could put Black writers I knew in touch with agents during meetings, the prospect of writing anything outside of my silly little newsletters felt unpleasant; I didn’t want to cash in on ‘the moment’ and find myself packaged into something tangential to what I care or know about.
This year has seen a lot of focus on small, independent businesses. Partly a reaction, stronger than I’ve seen in previous years against Jeff Bezos and Amazon, but partly a fascination with young self-determined women, be they a SHEO or an indie maker with an online shop for their crafts, the link between the purchase and support for a movement has been strong.
As the fall of the Wing this year shows, the ‘girl boss’ phenomenon requires some unpacking (see Sirin Kale’s article on the matter for Tortoise), but so too does the performed guilt around to finding companies like the Wing or Glossier, who advertise to us convincingly appealing. Rachel Connolly’s article This Brand is Late Capitalism unpicks some of the patterns of a particular style of article.
For me, most uses of the term ‘late-stage capitalism’ can be divided into two camps: ‘work sucks, I know,’ where what we’re talking about is a different kind of alienation through labour to previously; in lieu of greater discussion on rights and labour laws we use the term ‘precarious’ to describe a whole host of working practices, often sidestepping class. But there’s also ‘it really do be like that’ which places agency in the hands of the system: somehow, we live in a consumerist society, but as consumers we have no options or choices. I am less convinced of this and it’s why I switched off Jia Tolentino’s interview with FT Culture call in spring, as I explain here in my defence-ish of the term ‘sell out.’ We owe things to people and those things don’t have to be purchases.