If you’re participating in discourse about race, gender or sexuality on social media — I beg you, please also be reading the discourse off social media. Books. I beg you. Pick them up. You can find many for free online via the library and otherwise. Your perception is not enough.

Things that happened in your family, in the region where you grew up — these are important pieces of information, but they do not form a complete picture of how the world works.

Part of the process of writing — even writing on Twitter because yes twitter threads ARE writing — is reading. Reading extensively, in multiple mediums. https://twitter.com/raulpacheco/status/1136747423001452555?s=21

Reading other tweets is not enough. Neither is reading blogs. You need to read stuff that involves the archives, that has been edited, has been subjected to rigorous debate. Stuff that people spent years thinking through and writing out.

There are important reasons to read beyond books — the academy and publishing industry have traditionally been hostile to many groups. But you will also find that marginalized people HAVE managed to put a lot of important work into book form.

And being well-read means that you will learn to know the difference between, for example, a great James Baldwin quote and a great Son of Baldwin quote. I see a lot of people assign SoB to JB because they don’t know JB’s work well enough to know the difference ....

It is fucking fantastic that you are reading SoB because he is my play cousin. But he’s called Son of Baldwin because ... of Baldwin. You gotta read both to fully understand SoB’s context.

And if you’re reading Baldwin, you’re better off reading Lorde with them than not.

(I’m sure btw that SoB would recommend many many other texts, including his forthcoming novel, which is slated to come out around the same time as my book! For which I have been doing a FUCKTON of reading.)

If you’re wondering what I would recommend, some stuff that influences my commentary is here: https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1057456591052644353?s=21

Most of what I’ve read isn’t on that list, but it’s a starting point. The list isn’t even up to date for things that should probably be on it.

We are living in an INCREDIBLE time for new books by Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx scholars and thinkers as well as white LGBT scholars and thinkers. Especially women and femmes. It’s very hard to run out of material that reflects these standpoints.

A lot of these authors are also on Twitter, writing threads that break down some of the core concepts of their books and scholarly articles.

I recently contributed to a chapter on intersectionality in STEM education research and
1. I did not do it alone
2. I went back and re-read old papers and parts of books I hadn’t read in years for what was about 1000 words of writing. It was a lot of reading. That’s how it goes.

After I wrote this thread I saw someone in my newsfeed giving the wrong Baldwin credit ... so here we go https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1137541216214454272?s=21