I didn’t read much today, opting to spend my two hours of commute time finishing some

podcasts that I’d started. And when I got home, I chose not to do the video challenge because I wasn’t feeling inspired.  I was, however, feeling inspired by the bookstagram aspect of the Booktubeathon challenge. My wife even participated. Here’s the photo I took of her — she’s a huge Octavia Butler fan, if you couldn’t tell by her collection.

I was really inspired by this challenge as well. I write a series called Feature Shelf whenever I get around to it, and the idea of this collection came from one of the Feature Shelves I have in my queue. But before I get to the pictures, I want to talk about this a little first.

I’ve been thinking about the photos I wanted to take all day.

One of the things I’ve done on my blog, for the most part, is avoided explicit conversations about race. This was partly because this space was originally created for my students to find books they’d want to read, and I didn’t want to push too much of my agenda on them. It was also partly because I was afraid of rejection from the potential non-student readers of my blog.

But I’m not in the classroom anymore. That isn’t to say that there aren’t teachers who aren’t using my blog. I’m just saying that I feel less of a need to censor who I am and how I select my reading choices because of who’s reading it.

That is to say, I’m not going to censor myself in my own space anymore. I’m not going to be less black in a space that I pay for to make my readers comfortable. I’m not going to be less queer in a space that I pay for to make readers more comfortable. I shouldn’t have done it in the first place. There is no going back, only forward, and I’m going to be more authentic in this space than I have been in the past.

If you made it this far, here are my two photos. This is the most blatantly black that I’ve been here or in Instagram yet. I’m going to put it out there because this is what I need right now.