BCL Chat: YouTube and Black Booktubers

We try to talk Booktube and get distracted by our general distrust of social media. Inspired by the HuffPost piece titled "Where Are All the Black Booktubers?," we decided to investigate the question ourselves.

What we found wasn't that surprising: Plain ol' racism is keeping many Black booktubers from thriving. Naya, of Naya Reads and Smiles (the largest channel lead by a black booktuber), also spoke on the issue in her own video. The disparity between White booktubers and Black booktubers is undeniable. “White BookTubers who garner at least 300,000 subscribers on their YouTube channels … and two out of three of them even have their own published novels. On the flip side, the most well-known African-American BookTuber to date is Naya Reads and Smiles, with only 58,000 subscribers, despite having been uploading videos for years.

In other news, we also discussed:

• • Toni Morrison passed away, and Roxane Gay wrote a great piece for The New York Times about her legacy. There were also great pieces in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Sojourners.
  • Speaking of New York Times. An editor at there was demoted following multiple bad takes regarding race and his entitled behavior/harassment toward Roxane Gay.
  • This bold take claiming there's no point in reading anything if it's not a classic.
  • Whether this guy is an asshole for eating three feet of a six-foot sub.