Hey Reader

I was reading a history book last week when a single paragraph made me put it down.

Not because it was too much. Because I needed a minute to think about what I'd just understood.

The book is These Truths by Jill Lepore. The paragraph was about an uprising in 1676 Virginia — poor white servants and Black people, some free, some enslaved, fighting together. They burned Jamestown. They nearly toppled the colonial government.

And then they lost.

What happened next is the part that stopped me. Because the colonial ruling class didn't just put down the rebellion. They looked at what had made it possible — poor white people and Black people with a common cause — and they decided to make sure it couldn't happen again.

The mechanism they chose was race.

Free white men got more political rights. The legal definition of who could be enslaved hardened around Blackness in ways it hadn't been before. By 1680, one observer noted that "these two words, Negro and Slave" had "grown Homogeneous and convertible."

The rebellion had revealed a fault line. The response was to deepen it — deliberately.

And then came the literacy laws.

After the rebellion, teaching enslaved people to read was gradually criminalized across the colonies. Not because reading was inherently dangerous. Because access to reading was dangerous — to the people who had just watched what happens when those at the bottom of the social order find a common cause.

A person who can read the law might question it. A person who can write can organize. A person who can circulate an argument becomes harder to control. Here's what I think I've figured out.

Literacy was never just an educational skill. It was always a question of who gets to participate in the conversation that shapes power.

That's the machinery underneath the history. And it didn't stay in 1676.

We talk about literacy now like it's settled — of course everyone can read, of course everyone can write. But the question has just shifted.

Who gets to evaluate what they read?

Who can tell the difference between evidence and a convincing imitation of evidence?

Who knows how to ask a better question instead of accepting the first answer that sounds right?

Artificial intelligence is forcing this harder than anything since the printing press. If a tool can draft, summarize, argue, and generate language — sometimes fluently, sometimes wrongly, sometimes both at once — then the new literacy isn't about producing words. It's about judgment. Knowing when to trust the answer. Knowing when the summary has flattened the interesting part. Knowing when you're thinking and when you've quietly outsourced your thinking to someone else who stands to gain from people believing what they say, even when it's wrong.

Books are where I practice that. Not because reading is virtuous. Because sitting with difficulty, following an argument, and resisting the first clean conclusion is a skill — and skills need reps.

These Truths didn't give me a takeaway. It gave me a better question.

Those questions are not behind us. They have just changed tools.

What do you think counts as literacy now? Hit reply — I'd love to know.

— Tracy