On the Unbearable Whiteness of Bookstagram

Not quite racism...

In his Why Are Writers Doing This? (linked), Kern Carter explores the notion of writers telling their reader about the book rather than showing. He begins with one of the most popular #bookstagram and #booktok literary authors: Sally Rooney, with a breakdown of how she explains the themes and motivations behind her novel Normal People. The phenomenon of the writer telling their audience isn’t new, it’s existed in popular literature of every era. They’re entertainment: plot-heavy, accessible, sometimes, genre fiction. In The Years (2008), Annie Ernaux points out that women read far more novels, and have more reason to desire the escape they provide. Look at best seller’s lists of decades past, and there are many titles that don’t carry the cache of not best selling prose stylists and literary philosophers of those bygone eras.

That article got me thinking more about the books that are popular on social media. Undergirding the trend of which books are popular today is the subtext of what makes them accessible and popular: they’re Western, white, cis hetero-normative. What does it mean to be white? Of course, it’s race and skin color. It’s also the confluence of factors of privilege and class: the greater access to people in positions of power, and to capital, to generational wealth, and of gaining mentorship and knowledge of how to play the game of education and work that brings success. You can see this version of whiteness through two very popular bookstagram/booktok authors: Donna Tartt and Sally Rooney.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and Goldfinch (2013) circle around this, with characters who obsess over class, and aspire and look up to those in the higher class. In The Secret History, a center character grew up working class in Plano, CA, and wound up hanging out with an intellectually elite clique at a stand-in of the U.S. college famous for its tuition being the highest in the country. In The Goldfinch, the main character idolizes a young woman of a higher class than him. This aspiration equates to characters who look down on people of lower classes, and the lower classes include people of color. Tartt leans heavily into the racism with negative stereotypes of Asian-Americans, eg., she describes as Asian-Americans as smelling terrible at length and working the most menial jobs, rather than, say, positive stereotypes (South Asians as doctors, Asians as model minorities who are great at math). A more nuanced author could have avoided stereotypes altogether. For the citations, Substacker Trina Das wrote an insightful piece that includes explicitly racist passages from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Even so, Das carefully, repeatedly explains to people I’m not saying you or Donna Tartt are racist.

Back to Sally Rooney, who is arguably the most popular vaguely literary author on social media. About Rooney, Jessie Tu writes “You’re supposed to like her books. It’s tasteful – a cultural signifier. Yet, her stories merely celebrate privileged white people doing privileged white things including going to elite colleges” [Tu, Jessie. “Surely there are better literary heroes for our generation than Sally Rooney?” The Syndey Morning Herald. August 21, 2021.] Tu didn’t include the qualifiers that Das did in her piece, and The Guardian published a piece accusing Tu of malice. There’s nothing Rooney has said, and nothing in her works that is explicitly racist. The character who is racist in Normal People (2018) is an unlikeable guy in the most black-and-white way, and Rooney makes it very clear that his racism is a negative quality. Like Tartt, her work explores power, privilege, and class. Like Tartt, she links these with whiteness. Unlike Tartt, she doesn’t illustrate her point with negative stereotypes. In Rooney’s books, people of color aren’t visible. The main characters are white, the secondary characters are white. The college Marianne, one of the main characters in Rooney’s Normal People attends has 65% white enrollment. The Trinity College of Normal People, through the friend groups of the two main characters, isn’t nearly as racially diverse.

So what does it mean in the context of bookstagram and booktok if the characters of a book are not? That books by non-white authors and non-white characters aren’t as popular, and books by non-white, non-hetero-normative authors and with non-white, non-hetero characters end up on lists and in posts about reading more diversely or reading about diversity. In social media posts, they’re separated from the more popular books, as if prescribed to help the reader feel like a better person, less likely to be accused of othering or racism. Examples include Rachel Khong’s Real Americans (2024) or James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (2023), both of which are written in accessible literary style. The diversity/othering angle holds true for genre fiction as well, R.F. Kuang’s Babel (2022), N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth series, or Tasha Suri’s The Burning Kingdoms series, all of which are critiqued online for being less accessible or overwrought in their anti-racist/anti-imperialist/anti-colonist themes. It means that Meta can block #lesbian, and people don’t go up in arms they way they would (theoretically) if Sally Rooney was blocked. It also means that only three percent of books published in English are translated.

And what does it mean if you’re a person of color who isn’t heteronormative? It means that people harass you for writing a less-than-favorable review about a book. You feel like the other. It means, as Trina Das states:

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I'm not sure if a piece of media has ever made you feel like you don't belong, but I can only liken it to a strange sense of betrayal. A sinking realization of: Oh. I was not the intended audience for this.

There are two counterargument to be made: first, that there are people of color on bookstagram and booktok, and not everyone shares my thoughts on it. This is why I speak to privilege: that people of color also aspire to privilege, and we as individuals have different levels of tolerance for feeling othered or outcasted. Here’s one example, and it’s around dating: the Asian women dating White men trope. It shows up anecdotally in one of the most popular stories from The New York Times’ popular Modern Love column “When a Dating Dare Leads to Months of Soul Searching”. If you click through to the story, note that the URL contains “asian-racism”. In his essay, Andrew Lee believed his now-wife’s early behavior - her lack of attraction to Asian men, her dating history of only dating white men - to be a form of internalized racism. I had theorized that from the Asian women’s perspective, the desire to date white was an attraction to the greater privilege that comes with whiteness, which is a milder form of internalized racism. A February 2024 study confirms Andrew Lee’s thought, as it showed that Asian women who chose to date white men show more signs of internalized racism, and internalized empowerment and resistance was linked with dating more Black and Latino men. My inclination is toward latter. I have a naturally rebellious tendency toward resistance that showed up when I was a child. I’ve been fortunate in mostly being in communities, school, etc. that are heavily Asian-American: I grew up in a Bay Area suburb that’s nearly 70% Asian-American and graduated from universities that skew Asian-American. My tolerance for racism and homophobia is also less because I have greater experience in being in places with less of it. Second, if the majority of people on bookstagram and booktok are white, then their personal experience are such that they’d rather read white characters written by white authors over reading occasional #diversity. Of course. Selecting books and reading is a subjective, personal experience. But it’s also social media. It’s not democratic, and the apps with their mysterious algorithms, choose which content to recommend, forcing what goes viral. If you couple that with hashtags such as “lesbian” being blocked, and the evidence that certain words and terms, such as “Palestine” and “Gaza” being demoted and not shown to users, it stands to reason that the content/books recommendations are influenced by the apps themselves, and readers using the apps are making choices that aren’t fully determined by free will.