Author Frederick Joseph asks consumers to stop buying his books at Target
Frederick Joseph speaks out after Target announced last week it was ending its DEI initiatives in their stores.
For author Frederick Joseph, the answer to how to respond to Target’s plan to scale back its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts is simple: stop buying his books from the retailer.
On Wednesday, the author of “The Black Friend” (Candlewick Press) posted a video on threads pleading with the public not to support his books through the retailer. His video was in response to the growing backlash and calls to boycott Target that stands to impact many marginalized business owners.
“When it was like, oh, well being, quote, unquote, woke makes money. ‘Let’s partner with Black people,’” he said. “Now that Trump is in office, and there’s this, you know, sort of anti-Black, anti-woke agenda sweeping through not just the federal government, but also corporations around the country, now they’re like, ‘Okay, well, Black people, brown people, trans people, queer people don’t make money anymore, so we’re off it.’”
He added, “And then I’m sure that when the pendulum swings back, they’ll be back on it again. I can’t stand for that.”
Joseph, who has sold his books through Target since 2020 and currently has a book — “This Thing of Ours” (Penguin Random House) — available for pre-order, said he would remove all of the links to the store on his website following a memo sent to Target’s employees on Friday, Jan. 23, announcing the decision. He also asked that anyone looking for a copy of one of his titles shop for them at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere else that “actually supports and cares about marginalized people.”
In a follow-up essay published on his Substack on Thursday, Joseph expanded further on how his decision is rooted in the legacy of Black resistance.
“There is a long history of Black people in this country being told that survival requires our silence,” he wrote. “That to demand dignity, to demand reciprocity, is to ask for too much.”
He added how it was “not lost” on him that asking people to stop supporting him at Target could lead to a major hit in his sales.
“I know that the weight of this decision is not abstract,” he wrote. “It is financial. It is logistical. It is the difference between a book moving thousands of copies in a single week and one that struggles to find its audience.”
He said he is making “this request with full knowledge of the stakes. This is not easy. But it is necessary.”
Speaking in the video, Joseph explained that he had “a pretty solid” relationship with Target up until this point. His relationship with the retailer began in 2020 with the sale of his debut book, “The Black Friend,” which he said involved an in-depth promotional rollout featuring a video of him discussing the book. As his relationship with Target progressed, he eventually released an exclusive edition of another title with the retailer.
“They did these things when it was financially advantageous,” he said, noting the timeline spanned 2020 through roughly 2022.
Joseph is only the latest person to speak out following Target’s decision. On Friday, Jan. 23, Target announced in a memo that the retailer would be scaling back its DEI initiatives despite still being on track with goals to diversify shelves set in 2022.
In his essay, Joseph highlighted how, despite the promises and gains Target has made over the last five years, their decision was “not surprising” to the writer.
“It is, in fact, the most predictable thing,” he wrote. “Just a few years later, we are watching the rapid undoing of what was always tenuous at best. DEI departments gutted. Pledges unfulfilled. Partnerships quietly dissolved.”
He added how none of this was happening at Target or beyond “subtly.”
“This is happening in full view, at the precise moment when the political tides are shifting, when Trump has returned to office, and when the so-called “war on wokeness” has become a rallying cry,” he said.
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