[Pedro Poitevin]

Like Orwn, I was not impressed with Citizen. It reads like a hypersensitive (and badly written) essay by a delicately aggrieved person wallowing in self-pity. The stoics may not have been right about a few things, but they would have rightly cringed at the rise of the term "micro-aggression." It's important point out how society and culture frames and depicts us (minorities), but what Rankin has done isn't that.

On the other hand, I'm very skeptical of the meritocratic view according to which merit can be judged objectively. Coming from a field in which merit is significantly more easily judged objectively (in mathematics it is far easier to agree about who are the best of the bunch), literature strikes me as a field in which culture and identity seep into taste. If white men keep winning awards, it's probably to a large extent because the people who give these awards have a cultural sensibility built on the expectation that the awards should go to people who write like white men winning awards.

If you are white, it's likely that you will think that some white poet or writer is "objectively" better than the competition, and the strange cultural viewpoint that permeates the work of the cultural other will not appeal to you as much, perhaps because you are not as well trained in reading it with care. This is only natural, and it goes a long way to explain why poetry magazines only publish Latino poets when they write about abuelitas, ancestors, identity, etc., when, in fact, some of the better Latino poets out there are much better (even when not writing about the cliche topics) than many revered luminaries, at least from my vantage point. Then again, my vantage point is truly bilingual. I think a lot of people who are not truly bilingual are much more likely to remain naively meritocratic in their views.