My point on jailing, which should be obvious, is here we're talking about artistic stakes and audience tastes; a world like "could" (which I used) perhaps could open up more. I don't want it to.
Do you think white actors should play roles in blackface? How is visually recalling minstrels different than aurally? You keep saying that it was Carlson-Wee's very act of trying on a black persona is what caused the furor, but you are wrong on this. All the serious critiques, whether we agree with them or not, focus on his language. First, not every black person speaks in AAVE. Second, in jumping in to that specific persona and speaking from it poorly, I can see the argument that he's not far from minstrelsy. You talk about the Civil War, but that's not what this is about. The history of minstrelsy pushes far past that, and the history of appropriating a black voice to denigrate black people's intelligence stretches to today. To keep the black/jewish parallel, it would be like a non-Jew writing a poem and being overly concerned with money. Are there ways in which it logically fits into the poem? Sure, but that's a narrow window that isn't going to stink of anti-Semitism, and a Jewish person who is writing that poem is necessarily going to strike the audience differently. Take, for instance, pretty much anything Sacha Baron Cohen does. That's what the critiques are.
There are many effects that art can and should have, one of which should be unsettling the reader. Far too many poets fear trying new things or pushing their audience. That said, the further a poet pushes into areas that unsettle the audience, the more excellent the poem needs to be to justify it. It's like walking out onto a triangular edge over an abyss, or being asymptotic. Can a white man write a poem about Trayvon Martin? Sure, but it needs to be damn good for it not to come across to most as exploitative.
You don't ignore holocaust deniers or the Alex Jones' of the world; they're symptoms of a disease in society, and you don't ignore symptoms (though I don't think they should get the
excessive media they do get). But that's a side-bar.
That's a depressingly pessimistic view of the human capacity for imagination and empathy that might one day get us out of our tendency towards tribalism.
I don't think so. I think it's realistic for the reasons I noted. I think we ultimately can and must move past tribalism. And I'm not telling people that they can't or shouldn't empathize. There's a difference between empathizing and creating well-meaning art about it that misses the mark to people and then attempting to publish that.