Sometimes white people don't get that a conversation that's uncomfortable or inconvenient for them is actually painful for POC.

A WOC saying we should critically examine the classics doesn't warrant a white woman acting like she's being attacked. She was uncomfortable.

It's uncomfortable to hear that someone doesn't like your favorite book.

How do you think I felt at 17 when my teacher tried to explain a book's reference to the racial slur "sambo" to the white students in class and almost put images of sambo dolls on her projector?

How do you think I felt, trying to calmly say "No, please don't do that" so as not to be viewed as the angry Black girl, when I couldn't express that seeing my classmates laugh at disgusting caricatures of Black people would be triggering to me?

How do you think I felt, walking into English class on my first day of college, just as a white student was mocking Achilles and Agamemnon for "acting like angry Black women"? Do you know the cost of hearing that?

Do you know I felt the eyes of the 13 or so other students in the room traveling to me, and I knew that expressing my actual feelings about this would make things worse, because it would look like I was proving this dude's point?

Do you know what it feels like when Harriet Beecher Stowe is lauded for "finally telling white people how horrible slavery was" AS IF WHITE PEOPLE DIDN'T ALREADY KNOW AND THERE WEREN'T BLACK FORMERLY ENSLAVED AUTHORS WHO WROTE IT FIRST HAND?

Just the very idea that it takes a white person saying Black people are suffering for other white people to be like "WHAT? Black people are suffering?" even though Black people have been saying it for a long time is mind-boggling.

This is not even getting into a deep discussion of racism in the classics. This is the basic idea of what it's like to be a Black person in an English class in a country that's trying to gaslight you.

As meta as this sounds, do you know what typing this thread feels like for me? My hands are shaking at the memory of years of biting back outrage. I've been too anxious to talk about this for days, but I felt like I couldn't just sit by.

I'm saying #DisruptTexts is personal for a lot of us, and I hate that white people's discomfort is prioritized over POC's pain every day.

Someone thinking critically about classic literature is not a personal attack on the people who like it. What the author did in response was an attack. It was racist bullying, and we need to call a spade a spade.

And there are still WOCs getting attacked over this discussion, and for what? For what? Stop painting WOCs as bullies b/c they have a different opinion of literature from someone else.