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:

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2 Comments

  1. I have to laugh at the comment about feeling too old to comment….embrace it and comment anyway! I’m old and never thought twice about engaging with y’all in Twitter and now here

    1. LOL! I appreciate this comment. Replying to it several months too late to be polite should give you an idea of how great we are at social media.

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