I posted the McWhorter because I am interested in the debate.
"Do you really think the publication, in a left-wing magazine like The Nation, of a poem whose only crime may be clumsiness is going to fuel more racism of the sort you describe from your upbringing?"
No, not really, but I can see why people of color might be wary of something edging on minstrelsy, and no surprise you can find people who are more right-wing on Twitter trying to champion the poem. They were doing so even before 'The Nation' put up it's apology.
Craven is a better word; I don't know Smith's poetry, and I don't love Burt's, though I respect the hell out of her intellect and criticism.
Woke is just white people who "get it."
I'm not going to go through Eve Ewing's whole twitter feed to get back to roughly when it was published, in part because I may be wrong, though I suspect given the domain that she treads that she was one of the first on it, and probably one of the more insightful.
As to creative freedom, I'm generally on your side. But I think we do have to have context. Here's an idea:
Philip Roth has his Zuckerman character fall in love with someone he convinces himself is Anne Frank. Can that even work if he isn't Jewish?
I can't seem to find the novel--and it generated a lot of controversy even among the Jewish population--but it came out a few years ago and Anne Frank survives and is quite vulgar in it. Can a non-Jewish person do that?
Mel Brooks made "The Producers" in the late 1960s. Could anyone else do that?
There was a lynching in 1981 in the US, and in certain parts of the country the noose comes up as a threat hanging places still to this day. The Confederate Flag waves over some states. I can imagine it's more real here than it would be elsewhere.
Threaded Mode
