The way white people in publishing try to force authors of color to write about culture is just as racist as white people forcing authors of color to only write white characters.

If you only respect us when performing our culture for your consumption, you don't respect us.

This goes without saying, but PoC have so many different levels of connection with our cultures. Some not at all.

Yet white pub will force us to write caricatures of cultures we don't really know rather than let us write our own experiences bc they don't exoticize us enough.

The pressure to include languages we don't speak, history we don't study, pain we've never directly faced... it's a gross comodification of our experiences for white consumption.

If we *choose* to explore & reconnect to our cultures, that's fine. But it needs to be our choice.

And so long as publishing insists on selling us purely by how our identities educate and entertain white readers, we can never really *make* that choice.

Choices made under duress aren't choices at all. If it's the only way to have a career, that decision is all but made for us.