Down in the automatic subsystems of the brain, the evolutionary strata that support and shape our consciousness. We could see it altering when and where people pulled the trigger. We could see it in the reaction time data, in the motion of the eye, in the lightning of the brain. We could see the cultural story that links black Americans to violence. I operated millisecond-level reaction trackers, studied eyetracking data, and joined a lab that hunted the very neural correlates of implicit racial bias: not the blunt, conscious prejudice we hold in contempt, but the automatic, low-level associations that infect us all. Stories provide us with cognitive schema, altering our models of how the universe behaves.įor many years I studied racial bias in police shootings. It hates to think, because thinking is really expensive. but first, let’s talk about the power of stories.

It’s not necessarily more powerful or meaningful than yours. In the process, she risks being changed in turn.Ĭan Baru enact the stories she’s given without being devoured by them? Can she subvert these stories in order to defeat them? Baru enters this story and attempts to change it from within. In this story, mighty powers present young Baru Cormorant with a story about who she is and who she must become. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a novel about the cutting line between subversion and complicity. Junot Diaz wrote that “white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that it exists always in other people, never in us.”

The Book’s About The Line Between Subversion and Complicity How many of your beliefs are you willing to sacrifice in order to be effective? If you want to speak, you need to convince people to listen. If you want to change the world, you need power. This is true not just of books, but of everything! If you want to change politics, you have to be an effective politician. If no one reads your book, it can’t change anyone but you. This novel’s written to work as a fast-paced, emotionally taut thriller. If you just want to read a great story, you can stop right here! Nothing below will matter to you. The book must succeed as a piece of craft. If you do, I’ve drawn out a few of the core points below. If you don’t want to know anything about what I was thinking when I wrote this book, turn back now. So there’s a barrier we have to maintain between author, text, and audience, a barrier of impersonality and remove. Readers couldn’t discuss a book if they saw that book as a human being. You must, at times, pretend to be no one. I felt like I had to let the book speak for itself.īeing an author carries a strange hollow weight. A few months ago I sold a long essay about my goals in The Traitor Baru Cormorant - artistic goals, yeah, but also human goals.

The traitor baru