The video, labeled “About y’alls favorite ‘statistics,’ ” blew up overnight. So shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.” “And all those stupid stats that you keep using are operating off a small sample size. And white perpetrators are undercharged, so of course they have lower rates of crime,” she sang. “Black neighborhoods are overpoliced, so of course they have higher rates of crime. So the 28-year-old elementary school music teacher from North Carolina opened up TikTok and added her own commentary, in song form. In June, Erynn Chambers watched a TikTok video from drag queen Online Kyne, talking about how statistics are manipulated to make it appear that Black Americans are more violent. “Being unlikable is not unacceptable.With more than 562,000 followers and nearly 40 million likes, Erynn Chambers has become one of the most popular creators raising awareness of the Black experience and anti-Black racism on TikTok. “It’s not necessarily a question of how we learn to live with being unlikeable, it’s how we learn to stop placing value judgements on behaviours of others.” - #3bookspodcast “In a perfect world, children would not feel like sexuality is this shameful secretive thing.” - #3bookspodcast “I think we have to decouple sex from shame and from morality, and do so in age-appropriate ways, and in ways that respect parents’ values.” - #3bookspodcast “When we talk about wokeness really what we’re saying is that you make me uncomfortable because you are forcing me to question my place in the world and how the world functions and how I benefit from it.” - #3bookspodcast “When we talk about cultural relativism, especially in the United States, we tend to be overly prescriptive and to think that what is good for us is inherently good for everyone else, but that’s not the case.” - #3bookspodcast “I didn’t really learn that I deserved to be loved well until I was loved well.” - #3bookspodcast
But most of us are full of self loathing and people love us anyway.” - #3bookspodcast “A lot of self-help has you believe that you have to find that thing within yourself and that if you work hard enough at loving yourself you will be ready for someone to love you and that’s just nonsense. “There isn’t any nobility in settling.” - #3bookspodcast How do we stop caring about what other people think? Why is it so destructive to associate sex with shame? How do we teach kids about sex these days? What are the ingredients for finding love? How do you navigate the TBR (to be read) pile?
Please email Manuela at with your donation receipt. I will match all 3 Books listener donations up to $5000. The arts world needs us all the time but even more so during this pandemic. This chapter is in partnership with Roxane and Performance Space NY, an alternative arts hub currently raising funds for housing insecure Black and trans artists. Are you ready to hang out with Roxane’s incredibly compelling mind? We talk relationships, love, morality, sex, and, of course, her three most formative books. I read and loved Bad Feminist, dug into her treasure trove of essays on Medium, and listened to her on many podcasts including two episodes on the wonderful Design Matters with her wife Debbie Millman. I spent weeks preparing for this conversation and felt like a ravenous wolf trying to read and listen to as much Roxane as I could find. Roxane’s work is known for challenging mainstream narratives and deconstructing feminist and cultural issues through the lens of her personal experience as a Black queer writer. She launched Tiny Hardcore Press (in her words, publishing “books tiny in stature but grand in reach and spirit,”) and has been a professor at Eastern Illinois, Purdue, and Yale. She was an editor for The Rumpus, co founded PANK literary magazine, and is currently editor at Gay Mag. She is the author of numerous bestselling books including Ayiti, Bad Feminist, An Untamed State, Difficult Women and Hunger. She writes the Work Friend column at The New York Times as well as regular Op-Eds. Oh no, no, no, no, no! Roxane Gay is not that. So she’s an Internet junkie then, right? One of those social media “influencer” people? That kind of thing? Over 1,000,000 people follow Roxane across Twitter, Instagram, and GoodReads, where she is, no big deal, currently the #1 ranked best book reviewer on the entire platform.
Is it any wonder Roxane Gay has been dubbed by Playboy as the most important and most accessible feminist critic of our time?