We're also not talking, necessarily, about apology. I think we both are in agreement that the apology of the Nation was craven. Anders Carlson-Wee also apologized, and I'm of the mind that if you do such a bad job at a poem that you accidentally evoke minstrelsy, you should at least meditate on the choices that led you to this.
We're also not talking about legal, here. I don't think someone else trying to do "The Producers" should be jailed. But perhaps it might be more problematic for a non-Jewish person to make, let's say, a hardcore Anne Frank porn, than a Jewish person, no? Aren't these choices not just moving towards taste but moving into exploitation?
We're also not talking about, say, merely evoking the holocaust as Jim did. People complained that he may not have earned the weight of the association (I haven't gone through the whole thread). We're instead talking about actively picking up and speaking in the voice of someone who went through a collective tragedy. Imagine all you want: aren't you inevitably going to fail? Aren't the costs of failure necessarily coming across as exploitative?
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