In the past two years, a thriving subgenre has emerged within SFF romance where plucky young witches living in cozy witch enclaves find love. These books often have winning cartoon covers and cute punny titles. They are set in idyllic small towns with atmospheric names and vague geography (“outside of Carbondale” or “deep in the North Georgia mountains”). They’re prone to sudden eruptions of boosterish nostalgia for girlboss settler colonialism. They are overwhelmingly written by white women.
I believe the books are meant to be light-hearted and charming, and it is certainly possible to read them that way, if you are not reading fifteen of them in a row with the goal of answering the research question, why is this subgenre so white? But if you do have that research question, and you do read fifteen in a row, it becomes clear that they are (inadvertently, I believe) laundering racist ideas through a storefront of adorability, allowing white readers to feel—as the protagonists feel—like simultaneous victims of and champions against systemic bigotry.
