The morning after the election, as I was processing my feelings in real time, I dropped this little prediction in my Discord:

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I won't claim full prophecy points here; that was easy. We've had this conversation before and often, and the conditions were perfect for it to happen again.

That very day, a whole slew of videos made overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, by white women cropped up, all saying the same shallow thing in near-identical language. "Can't we just leave politics out of BookTok? This is my safe space. I need escapism. Politics don't belong here."

My initial response to this was, of course, to talk about how reading is political. Truly, if the question is "Can we keep politics out of BookTok?" the answer is "No," simply because it is impossible. Books are inherently political. You can, perhaps, ignore those politics, but that isn't a neutral act. That is also political.

Many people made this same point, and I also saw the conversation start to drift a little off the rails: people holding up Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros as examples of works that deal with politics without acknowledging the racism, ableism, and misogyny in those very same works; people naming books with very overt political plots as proof that books are political without acknowledging that all books are political, regardless of their genre or plot; people blaming anti-intellectualism, as well they should, but making it about reading speed, preferred genre or the aesthetics of a visual medium.

I thought a lot about what else, if anything, I could add to this conversation, especially because, in retrospect, it felt to me that talking about why books are political was missing the forest for the trees. Sure, it's important to acknowledge that books inherently carry politics, whether those politics are in the text as plot or reflection or out of the text, as the politics of literacy, access to books, and the decisions made about which stories are told and who gets to tell them. But, I believe there is something truly at the heart of every one of these videos that I'd like to talk about instead: white supremacy.

Yes, I'm serious.

White women's role in white supremacy has historically been one of complicity and active participation, whether they want to acknowledge that or not. The comfort of white women has been protected by a system that has consistently denied people of color the same privileges. When white women demand a "safe space" free from the politics that challenge their understanding of the world, what they are really asking for is a space where their comfort is prioritized at the cost of anyone—particularly those who are marginalized. And in doing so, they are furthering the very systems of oppression they continue to boldly support and benefit from.

When I hear these calls to "keep politics out of BookTok," I hear a deeply ingrained desire to maintain the status quo. This is legacy work—the kind of work that maintains the power dynamics that prioritize white women's comfort and tells them that any discomfort is actually a threat to their safety. Why else would they feel the need to make videos dictating to everyone else how we should conduct ourselves in community? Those are the actions of a child who believes that if the game isn't played their way, they have every right to stamp their feet and demand a return to the rules that play in their favor.

This is behavior informed by years of being told and shown that a white woman inconvenienced will have everyone around her bend to her will. This is the protection white women reach for when they vote with their race over their gender—the privilege not to hear or see you. It's a privilege ingrained in the fabric of society, where the discomfort of those who hold power is treated as more urgent, more worthy of consideration than the struggles of those who are marginalized.

This is not an isolated behavior. This is all working by design.

"White women's tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system." – Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars.

Truly, on the day after an election, for these white women to all turn on their ring lights, wring out a tear or two, and softly, pleadingly ask us to please protect their safe spaces? That can be seen as nothing more than the emotional manipulation that white supremacy thrives on. The kind of manipulation that starts with "Can't we all just get along?" and graduates to "the liberals are threatening to hurt us" and will almost certainly end in violence.

White supremacy craves violence against marginalized bodies, and white discomfort is the excuse it uses to justify that violence.

The "safe space" rhetoric isn't just a plea for emotional safety; it's the framework for a political agenda that aims to uphold these systems that have existed for centuries. White supremacy thrives in spaces where discomfort is avoided, where education is challenged, where media literacy shrivels, and where uncomfortable truths about race, class, ability, gender identity, and privilege remain unaddressed.

As Elaine Castillo says in How to Read Now, "White supremacy makes for terrible readers." She goes on to say, "Most people are not, in fact, all that ignorant, i.e., lacking knowledge or simply unaware. Bad reading isn't a question of people undereducated in a more equitable and progressive understanding of what it means to be a person among other people. Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity."

Works by design.

This call for a "safe space" in BookTok is not about actual safety but about preserving a sanitized, politicized version of the world that reflects their lived experiences and their worldview. And they do it as a form of organization. These calls are a collective action—an organization of white discomfort that seeks to close off political discussion, shrink the space of literature and community, and craft a world where the dominant voices remain untouched by harsh realities. It's a slow process of erasure, where the discomfort of white women, rather than the violence of systemic bigotry, is seen as the most pressing issue.

Every video I saw calling for a politics-free BookTok had thousands of views and hundreds of comments, each from people happy to have found others who thought like them. They were forming community. And maybe as well they should, as I cannot count anyone who looks at the camera with a straight face and asks to keep politics out of books as part of mine.

I hear the words they are saying even if they claim they do not: my existence as a Black woman online is politicized, and a call to keep politics out of BookTok is an invitation for me to see myself out.

But I won't. I refuse to let nicety politics erase my voice. I refuse to see white supremacy hard at work and pretend it's ignorance or well-meaning neutrality. It's neither. It's a deliberate attempt to ensure the comfort of those who benefit from the systems of power that oppress others.

I can’t stand by and let that happen in a community I care so much about.

💙

Marines

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