The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-first Century by Josh Cook

Author:Josh Cook
Format: epub

The Least We Can Do

White Supremacy, Free Speech, and Independent Bookstores

Apology

When Sean Spicer was given prime billing at BookExpo America and Milo Yiannopoulos tried to publish a book with Simon & Schuster, I churned out forty pages of text about free speech, white supremacy, and independent bookstores over the next several months, returning to it now and then as a salve or outlet for my frustration and then just . . . let it sit. I should have written something even earlier, after I had been in bookselling for ten years and watched Republicans and conservatives profiting—in terms of money and power—off the racist backlash to the Obama administration. Someone should have written something even earlier, as we watched the Bush administration start two endless wars, institute torture as an official American practice, and completely remake American society after the trauma of 9/11. Someone should have written something when Rush Limbaugh’s first book was published, before the reactionary racism of right-wing talks shows became fully mainstream. Like so many white, liberal Americans, I thought the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement were secure and that even if there was still a long way to go toward true social and racial justice, at least we weren’t sliding back. It’s embarrassing. Only the thinnest veils were thrown over the racism of the war on drugs, criminal justice reform, and welfare reform. Even after the Tea Party rose to power almost entirely through the white grievance and racism stoked by Fox News. Even after the Republican Party formally embraced this radical version of themselves. I did not see a resurgent threat and I did not see my complicity in that resurgence.

At most, I was an active participant in a conversation with the Porter Square Books managers group about our relationship to books written by and/or supporting contemporary right-wing, conservative, and/or Republican authors, with some of us arguing that we needed to dramatically change that relationship, and others arguing that the current relationship is correct. Parts of that conversation will appear throughout this essay. But as the Trump administration, Fox News, and Republican politicians enacted more and more racist and destructive policies, we never reexamined that compromise. It just never seemed like the right time. There were always more pressing problems. Once the pandemic hit, we never felt like we had the emotional reserves for that difficult conversation. And I didn’t force it. I expressed myself on Twitter and in informal conversations, but I never truly pushed for a formal reexamination of what books we should allow on our platforms, what ideas we want to give space to, and what people we want to be a revenue stream for.

Money is power. The more money you have, the more time you can spend advancing your cause, the more people you can hire to help advance your cause, the more you can donate to other people and organizations advancing your cause. If you have money, you can pay lobbyists, create fake and biased studies to

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