Mark,
I'd say that a lot of the 'woke' white people weren't the first people to jump on this. Consider that Stephanie Burt published the piece. I think a number of bright and perceptive POC were the first to jump on this. I'm not going to Twitter search it, but I'd suspect people like Eve Ewing were probably at the forefront, and it made a number of people reconsider the initial reception. And I think that is valuable.
The long apology? Well, that strikes me as foolish. Walter's suggestion there is probably right on. But it wouldn't have made people happy, as the reaction to
Grace Schulman's NYT opinion piece showed. A lot of the problem, to me, is that people assumed, as Walter said, that the poem is self-evidently racist/problematic/whatever; to many people, it isn't. Some of the more nuanced voices on twitter challenged Schulman's piece in interesting ways--and on her terms--but most threw up their arms and suggested that she was supporting racism by supporting the Carlson-Wee piece.
Yet Carlson-Wee isn't racist; he just wrote a mediocre poem in a dialect he may or may not understand. Walter is right again that if he pulled it off most wouldn't have cared, but he didn't. So a journal that isn't racist published a poet who isn't racist; the content of it? Well, that does get more problematic. McWhorter tries to wave his hand and pretend that Black English is treated outside the academy as it is inside it; it isn't. I have racist white family members, and they have (not in front of my recently, but when I was too young to have the courage or clout to stand up to them) descended into what amounts to black face, in poor Black English (in their own ignorance, they just assumed you could, say, throw a "be" anywhere). I knew kids my age who did it, too...and that's in the inner-city public school I went to that was majority-minority. A butchered "black-voice" is and has been used for harm. But what do you do about that when, again, the journal, the editors, and the writer are manifestly not racist? Do we spend all our attention on it when the poetry world actually has more serious injustices (see, again, Walter's point on the Palestinian poet). The answer, to me, is no, at least not in the way it was dealt with. Without Twitter, the smartest critiques that led the way would have had some primacy; instead, we got a mob.
Walter: on the Sharif poem I hadn't thought that deeply about it, perhaps because the references are all over the road (Ovid, David/Goliath) and so I merely took it as a poem less about East/West and more about what it means to be defined by someone else, and finding power in that. It doesn't strike me as shedding much interesting light on that, but I hadn't thought about it in terms of propaganda, and I feel like I'm missing something in that.