Read a Fucking Book

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My greatest mentor, Professor George Cunningham, who taught Africana Studies and Literature at Brooklyn College, passed away recently. It’s a devastating loss. Professor Cunningham was the first of the very few Black male professors I ever had. He was someone who ignited and magnified my love of literature by teaching me how to read between the lines and in the margins; and he did so in what was the most enlightening college course I have ever taken: Reading Race.

Professor Cunningham—whom I could never bring myself to call George, even after I got my master’s degree—introduced me to some of my most important and lasting literary influences, including Herman Melville, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston. He told me that I was the best writer he had come across since Gloria Naylor, who was once a student and mentee of his. He taught me the reasons why dictators, royals, and enslavers throughout human history have endeavored to prevent the masses from having access to books or literacy. He gave me the insight necessary to not be bought and sold, to not be wooed by promises of fame, rewards, and riches in exchange for my integrity. He gave me the courage to be the kind of writer that might not be well-liked because I have to be honest and tell the truth even when doing so can be cantankerous, unpopular, and perhaps even deadly.

He taught me, in essence, how to be a menace to empire.

He was the kind of educator that regimes fear and attempt to silence because he made marginalized people aware of our marginalization and gave us the tools to sabotage systems of oppression. He wasn’t a spook and he didn’t sit by any doors. He kicked doors open and held them open so that all of us could run free. His passing leaves a tremendous chasm in the world, for he was not only relentlessly intelligent, but he was also the epitome of fire, grace, and kindness, a father figure to too many to count.

For me, Professor Cunningham’s death punctuates the death of another kind: the death of the American reader. I just finished reading an article in The Atlantic that Junot Díaz recently shared called “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch. Prior to reading this article, I thought of what was happening with reading in this country to be an increasing illiteracy. However, I have been introduced to the term postliteracy as a descriptor of what’s taking place:

By some measures at least, books continue to thrive. Last year, print-book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 new stores. Almost 400 independent bookstores sprang up in 2025. Substack has seen an explosion of subscriptions for long-form writing. Celebrities such as Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon have used their fame and influence to launch wildly successful book clubs. Audiobooks have become a billion-dollar industry.

But the optimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year…

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

Professor Cunningham was adamant that reading was one of the most important things a human being could do. In his courses, we had to read several novels, plays, essays, poems, and articles each semester. He didn’t give a fuck if you rolled your eyes at The Blacker the Berry, looked askance at Their Eyes Were Watching God, complained that Cane was too difficult to understand. We were expected to finish them all despite whatever other classes, responsibilities, and assignments we had. This meant we had to stay up late, into the wee hours sometimes, reading and writing—and we had to have cogent written and oral analyses of the texts we were assigned to read. And we had to be prepared to discuss and defend our positions in class. You know, because he was a real educator and we were real students.

And although I enjoyed all of it because Professor Cunningham showed me where the love was, I never really understood the mechanics of why reading ignites intelligence, critical thought, humanity, individuality, etc. Until now:

The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.

However, the American education system doesn’t give a shit:

Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year. Successive waves of education reforms have led districts to favor short passages over full books, the better to mimic multiple-choice reading-comprehension exams. Many of the most popular school curricula now rely on excerpts. Annemarie Cortez, the principal at an elementary school in Corona, California, told me that many administrators are instructing teachers not to assign full books; they’re supposed to be running discrete reading drills with short excerpts…

Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.

Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

Harvard, huh? Interesting. Let me make a mental note…

I think capitalism breeds this contempt. Busy parents who have to overwork in order to survive turn their children over to devices to raise. Increasingly reared by machines, newer generations are having difficulty understanding how to be human or how to have decent human interactions. They’re becoming something like cyborgs: functional but not thoughtful. Straight out of The Terminator. Other people aren’t real to them and you can tell by the bitter, mocking, vicious, and decimating ways they talk to each other on social media, or the avoidant ways they regard each other in person. An educator friend of mine told me that his elementary school students don’t even know the names of the children sitting right next to them in the classroom every day.

We are failing our children.

I know that this metamorphosis is engineered. The ultra-wealthy who designed the dehumanizing products that are turning our children into robots (and killing our children in places like Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Madagascar, and Mali) are protecting their own children from them. They know this shit is both addictive and hazardous and they’re making their billions from selling our own peril to us wrapped in bright, shiny, beeping packaging.

Meanwhile, digital devices have flooded American classrooms. In a New York Times survey, more than 80 percent of elementary-school teachers said students receive a school-issued device by the time they enter kindergarten. Lupita Villalobos, who teaches 3-year-olds at a pre-K in Duncanville, Texas, told me that the district gives each student a tablet to use during school. She’s prevented her students from using the devices, as she knows how much time they spend on them at home. “I had a student who had a very strong reaction to starting school,” she said. “Typically, students cry maybe the first couple weeks and say they want their mom. But this student would cry for her tablet.”

Sometimes I wonder if the American decline in book reading is more than just a nefarious plan by the American government to weaponize technology, trap Americans in a right-out-of-the-movies Matrix to ensure that we’re as ignorant as possible so that we’re as easy to manipulate as possible. Americans have, after all, always been easy to manipulate. Think about how simple it’s been to divide Americans over things that are meaningless in the grand scheme—race, gender, gender identity, region, religion, sex, sexuality, etc. Susceptibility to trickery is a defining American trait.

But I wonder if Mother Nature is conspiring against us as well. Has the planet, maybe the universe itself, determined Americans to be the most dangerous species on Earth and decided to begin the process of getting rid of us? Beyond our vulnerability to a problem we caused in the form of catastrophic climate change, are we now also genetically inclined to foolishness, passing it down from one generation to the next, guaranteeing a destruction from both the outside and the inside that will free existence from our rampage?

It all sounds so very speculative fiction, doesn’t it? Something out of some corny-ass M. Night Shyamalan film. Like both my imagination and suspicions of this country are running away with me, I know. The reason I ponder this is because the Horowitch article I’ve been referencing throughout this essay doesn’t really explicitly state how American a phenomenon this is—or how white. I know that when I travel outside of the United States, I begin to realize that this peculiar race toward asininity is almost uniquely American. Renowned author R. O. Kwon 권오경 and I were talking about the shock an American writer experiences when we travel beyond borders to promote our works. The enthusiastic reception one receives in places like Brazil, China, France, India, South Africa, South Korea, and more, no longer has an American equivalent.

In the United States, outside of some Black readers (and thank goodness for those Black readers, even if these industries like to pretend that Black readers, and Black booksellers, don’t exist; and the proof of their pretense is in the assembly line of anti-Black material, posing as art, that they produce, sometimes authored by Black people who are oblivious, turncoats, wounded, or some admixture thereof)—because Black people, arguably more than any other group of Americans, understand what’s at stake for a people who won’t read; Black people, more than any other people living under this country, because we, in fact, define the under, know how crucial community is in any endeavor and how foolhardy it is to abandon it—books are now often regarded as the least desirable form of entertainment. Thought to be akin to punishment, many Americans would rather walk on hot coals than read a book.

I imagine that this is because of all arts, literature demands the most of us. There can be no passivity in reading. The reader is called upon to journey inside the story, to travel to places that might not even exist, put themselves in shoes they have never tried on before, breathe when the character breathes, choke when the character chokes, think about what that teleportation, body possession, and vulnerability means when all is said and done, and how it may change them in ways that can be affirming or threatening.

Reading and writing can be the most insurgent of all human activities. That’s why white people have tried for centuries to keep Black people from being able to read or write. And our history is that we have defied them, which is why they exert so much control over what can be read and what can be written now. Literary gatekeeping is one of this country’s most enduring customs.

If reading and writing are revolutionary, it makes sense that Americans are increasingly weary of it. Americans are bred to be obedient. Obedient people are afraid of rebellion. Rebellion requires too much personal responsibility. And Americans are, maybe above all other things, irresponsible. How do I know? All one has to do it look at social media in concentration, at life at large, or read a study to see how anxious Americans are to follow trends (no matter how dangerous, foolish, harmful, or silly) and obey charlatans; how committed to misunderstanding we are; how reckless we are toward the well-being of others without a single critical or self-reflective thought about it. No, we blame all of our madness on gods.

Now that being a reader is optional, it can function as an identity marker. When you see someone on the train reading printed matter, it feels like a statement. Perhaps inevitably, such statements have become the stuff of online ridicule: Brandish a book too ostentatiously in public, and you might find yourself accused of “performative reading.” The label presumes the person is only trying to telegraph that they are highly educated or possess superior literary taste—why else would they lug a book around?

In the states, writers are seen as nuisances, as obsolete, as boring. Abroad, writers are seen as magicians, sages, blessings. The way Americans obsess over Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Caitlin Clark, Drake, Tom Holland, Travis Kelce, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Zendaya, or streamers? That’s the way other nations obsess over writers. No lie: When I was in Paraty and São Paulo, Brazil, I was treated as though I was some kind of second coming. People stopped me on the street to ask me to sign their books. My book was in almost every shop we passed. I was asked to be on their morning shows and in documentaries about books. Other writers were anxious to break bread with me and determined to be in conversation with me despite the language barrier. The entire city was a celebration of literature in a way that I have never seen in the United States. Though I imagine it might have been that way once. I did some digging: As unimaginable as it might be now, back in the 80s and 90s, thousands upon thousands of people would show up to book events to see authors Terri McMillan and E. Lynn Harris, for example.

My friends in other countries like Colombia, Kenya, and Tanzania talk to me about how they wish they could read more books, but books are expensive, sometimes very hard to come by, particularly if they deal with certain subject matter. So they cherish any moment they actually get to spend with one. Meanwhile, in the United States, we ban books, burn them, silence authors, try to kill them, confuse propaganda with learning, and worship senselessness:

Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”

Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age. “So many people, particularly in the academic and journalistic circles, think of him as a political revolutionary,” Roderick Hart, a communications professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “And I see him much more as a rhetorical revolutionary.”

Returning to the mental note: This, again, is where the article implies a demographic but doesn’t outright implicate it. But if we analyze who voted for Trump, break it down by race and gender and any other category, we will also discover who the leaders in and of this reading crisis are.

There’s a kind of peace in knowing that Professor Cunningham will not be around to witness his worst nightmare come to bear: humanity turning itself over to yet another set of masters; outsourcing all of the things it believed itself special for—living, thinking—to those with fiscal and malevolent intentions, who plot Minority Report-level dystopian schemes. There’s also power in knowing that he gave me a tradition of resistance to pass down.

The answer to the horror before us is relatively easy: Every time you’re experiencing a craving to be on your device, put it down and read a fucking book. Professor Cunningham didn’t put it to me exactly like that; but that was, in essence, how he guided me. He got me to imagine how dreary and pointless life would be if I scorned the work of, say, Maisy Card, Joél Leon, Kiese Laymon, or Jason Reynolds, in exchange for all the bells and whistles that keep us distracted, scattered, and confused.

It might be difficult, but we have to try to find the time to sit with our children instead of having our children sit in front of a screen. We must engage our villages if we have them. If we don’t, we should get to creating them if we can. Get them to buy in. Everybody can come together to raise up the babies like we used to do before we were told that nuclear was the bomb. It will take time to ween ourselves off the digital drugs; to not impulse-text, or tactile-scroll, or boredom-reach, or whatever. But in the end, our brains will thank us. As will our hearts.

The arrival of that world isn’t yet a certainty. Some people have noticed what we’re giving up, and they’re choosing a different path. Nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day. After Texas’s ban went into effect at the start of this past academic year, a Dallas school district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase. Rex Ovalle, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, told me he’s seen pushback against excerpts; some teachers are adding whole books back into their curriculum. Felton Thomas Jr., the executive director of the Cleveland Public Library, said that its youngest patrons have joined senior citizens in preferring print books to digital copies. If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile, the holdouts lose nothing by trying.

I won’t lie to you: There’s tremendous risk in reading and writing: In them, we may discover that we were right or we may discover that we were wrong. And the revelation of our humanity is in how we handle either of those possibilities. In the former, we’re often trapped by hubris, in the latter, deception. And the link is that the reduction of others is the reduction of self. Does that make sense?

What I’m asking myself now is:

If a writer writes and no one reads it, is he still a writer?

I’ll definitely let you know. Because even if no one reads another fucking word of mine, I’ve been writing since I was 6 and I’m going to write ‘til I die—knowing that starvation and loneliness will likely be the causes of my death. Because sometimes industries and individuals conspire.

But it don’t matter. Professor George Cunningham had the generosity of heart to see me as his son and gave to me the benefit of his wisdom from a life lived at the edge of the oppressor’s sword, neck pressed bravely against the blade, daring them to cut, exposing their cowardice because they didn’t: Purpose requires neither a cosign nor an audience.

A hundred years from now, if they aren’t already doomed, folks might catch up.