Hi Mark,
The idea that any presentation of racism in a poem (or a film/book) without putting up a large banner that says: "but of course, racism is a very bad thing" does look a lot like the proverbial health-and-safety-gone mad. In that respect, I personally don't see an issue with the poem section you've quoted that warrants it's removal. That's me, though, someone who isn't American, black or Japanese/Japanese-American.
That said, the question of who is talking about whom does make a difference to me. The old punching up or down thing. For example, I'm more comfortable with say, a person a mental health problem making jokes about those who don't have m.h problems (or about others with m.h. problems) than the reverse. Or with gay men making jokes or about straight men rather than the reverse. After all it's gay men who are more likely get the shit beaten out of them by straight men on a Friday night than the reverse. So, I guess I do have different standards, in general, in this respect. And I don't really have a problem with that. Maybe I should.
Though I still wouldn't like to posit any absolute rules around when it's appropriate for who to say what about whom. For me (again) my response is going to come down to my perception of intent and consequences. Though that perception is going to be
mine, and my knowledge of context and consequences may be limited.
For example, while I might be aware of the actual harm that ultimately results from stereotyping people with a psychotic illness as horror film villains, or assuming that anyone who carries out a mass shooting must have a mentally illness, or even perpetuating the idea that schizophrenia is the same as dissociative identity disorder etc. (variations on the old, "I'm schizophrenic and so am I" joke), but I might be less aware in other areas of what's going in other situations and power dynamics.
One situation where issues like the one you're raising has been discussed at some length in various places relates to Tony Hoagland's poem,
The Change, in which the white N is watching a tennis match and rooting for the white European tennis player over the "big black girl from Alabama" with "corn-rowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms ... some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite / or something like that". (Venus Williams, I guess), because the white woman is "was one of my kind, my tribe, with her pale eyes and thin lips".
Here's
Claudia Rankine's response, which presents her reaction to reading the poem and her dissatisfaction with Hoagland's response when she tackled him about it in person (under what circumstances it isn't clear). In which she says, "but I wanted my colleague to tell them right there in his poem that that kind of thinking…well, it's just not right".
Hoagland's response is here. He calls her approach to race "naive", and that it's naive "not to believe that [race] permeates the psychic collective consciousness and unconsciousness of most Americans in ways that are mostly ugly". Race is a topic for white people to address as well as for black people. The poet, he says,
"plays with the devil; that is, she or he traffics in repressed energies. The poet's job is elasticity, mobility of perspective, trouble-making, clowning and truth-telling. Nothing kills the elastic, life-giving spirit of humor more quickly—have you noticed?—than political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority."
What are the consequences of a white American exploring (his?) racism in public? How does that work for a black American reader? I don't know, I'm not black or American, and I very much doubt black Americans are a homogeneous group.
I guess an analogy might be to a man writing poems about to his (narrator's) rape fantasies without any clear indication of how the N/poet feels about them. Now here there are repressed energies. And truth-telling. And no doubt it's something useful for (some) men to investigate. But whether it's a useful/helpful thing to do in public, and how it would impact on (some) women I don't know.
But yes, with the above disclaimers, I personally didn't see an issue and think pulling that poem was an over the top. Hoagland's poem is still up -- along with Rankine's response and his to her. I'd say that was a better solution.
-Matt