Jim, I, too think he has a finger on the root problems. I just saw this article, which just came out. It is totally related to this thread.
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The logical reductio ad absurdum is that only the author should be allowed to translate his or her own work, since no one else has exactly the same combination of ethnicity and personal experience. Duh! The cretins strike again.
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Hi Julie,
I'm back, ha! Thanks for your kind words and for being so gracious in accepting some of my points. That’s rare. I probably said most of what I had to say about the Anders Carlson-Wee and Michael Dickman poems in threads discussing them at the time. The former is more pertinent to this current debacle because it concerns a poet speaking through rather than about someone from a different racial background so I’ll say a bit more about it. I still think the criticism of Carlson-Wee's poem was unnecessary in the level of its vitriol and more importantly that the apology by The Nation was not only a bad decision but in its wording one of the more stupid and craven things I've heard poetry editors say. The poet's own apology was understandable, if disappointing. He just wanted to get a mob off his back. But the editors words, "As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received" still make me rub my eyes in disbelief. I also wonder about this statement: "We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem". Really? Whole communities were affected and caused pain by this little poem? Where is the evidence of that? Roxanne Gay’s criticism that “Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy” looks quite ironic in the light of this statement. I think the editors are the ones guilty of this by assuming that if a bunch of people on Twitter (both black and white btw) claim offense then that must mean that all black people (or disabled people – the poem was also accused of “ableism”) would be equally pained and offended. To me, this seems more a case of “framing blackness as monolithic” than anything the poem does. I think to read the poem and conclude, as Gay seems to, that the poet thinks all black people talk like this and/or are homeless is to read it in very bad faith. Here it is (with its now permanently appended apology) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the.../how-to/tnamp/ I’m afraid I actually quite liked the poem. I think it’s a pretty effective little persona poem or character sketch that does a lot in a short space. Nothing about the voice seemed inauthentic to me and nothing about the representation of the character felt stereotyped or derogatory. The speaker comes across as intelligent, justifiably cynical and yet compassionate towards the unseen listener of the poem’s dramatic monologue. Most of the criticism seemed to be that the poet had dared to use AAVE at all. Roxanne Gay initially tweeted “Don’t use AAVE. Don’t even try it. Know your lane.” Some, including Gay, also claimed their objection was that the poem used AAVE incorrectly. But I couldn’t find one critic, including Gay, who backed these claims up with actual linguistic evidence. Prominent black linguist John McWhorter, who has since popped up on this thread, seemed to think the poem’s use of AAVE was authentic enough. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...nglish/566867/ I don’t think Carlson-Wee’s poem is amazing, but I think it passes all four of your factors in “determining whether getting out of one's lane is acceptable” and I would be confident in saying why (don't worry, I'm not going to -- unless you ask): Quote:
The idea that “people in privileged groups should not try to speak for people who have traditionally not had the experience of speaking for themselves, but who may be perfectly capable of speaking for themselves now” just seems like an unworkable edict to me. Carlson-Wee was largely attempting to speak for, and about the issues facing, homeless people, not black people. He chose to write in a voice suggesting his persona was black, presumably because in the US you are seven times more likely to experience homelessness if you are black. Homeless people are a group who still don’t have much opportunity to speak for themselves, aren't they? How do we know that the poet had not experienced homelessness himself or that someone close to him or in his family had? Did anyone bother to ask? Who, under the edicts of these literary rules, would be more capable and justified to write about black homelessness – a white man who had experienced homelessness or a black writer who had not? Would skin colour still be the deciding factor? What if a white poet had a black close friend who had experienced homelessness but had no aptitude for writing? Would it really be wrong for his poet friend to try to give voice to their experience? The idea of making taboo the poetic instinct of empathising with suffering seems wrong to me on an emotional level and fraught with logical inconsistencies on a practical level. People should be free to write about what they want. The argument is, I suppose, that if privileged white people are writing about this stuff then marginalised voices don’t get heard. I understand this but it would be more persuasive if the vast majority, or even many, of the poems written by white people were of this type. But as you were saying earlier to conny, they aren’t. You characterise poems addressing race written by white people as just one of many tired tropes: Quote:
Also, the idea that poets of colour are necessarily marginalised seems debatable. I googled “best poetry books of the decade” and the very first hit was the massive, mainstream website “literaryhub”. https://lithub.com/the-10-best-poetr...of-the-decade/ Their list for 2000 to 2019 comprises books by the following poets: Ann Carson Terence Hayes Tracy K Smith Natalie Diaz Natasha Trethewey Mary Szybist Claudia Rankine Robin Coste Lewis Ocean Vuong Danez Smith Of these poets, seven of the ten are poets of colour (and seven are women). And of the list the ones that seem to me to have been the most celebrated (Hayes, Rankine and Vuong) are among these poets of colour. That’s without even mentioning Rupi Kaur, the best-selling poet since Homer, and Amanda Gorman who is no doubt set to overtake her. Julie, I hope it’s clear that I’m pointing this out with no bitterness. I genuinely think it’s a good thing that these voices are being heard and celebrated and I'm not about to write a Bob Hickock style essay fretting about my whiteness being usurped. I honestly couldn't care less. I just think it’s disingenuous, and oddly defeatist given this evidence, to claim that POC voices aren’t getting heard in the poetry world on issues regarding race to the extent that it’s imperative to prescribe that white poets “don’t get to speak” about them. Finally on this, and most subjectively I suppose, there is just something about the current appetite on social media for demands that people apologise for producing and publishing art that gives me a quite viscerally negative reaction. And there is something about the morally superior tone of these demands and the expectation that even the subsequent apology, rather than being individual and thoughtful, must contain no deviation from an approved script (“do better”, “I promise to do the work”, “the hurt and pain I have caused”, “take time to reflect deeply”) that makes me nervous. And it’s never enough. When Carlson-Wee issued his apology on social media he said the criticism had been “eye-opening” and the first reply chastised him for his use of this term, noting that it was a further instance of his “ableism”, presumably because it could be offensive to blind people. There’s no indication that this reply was from a parody account. Erm…what else. The two writers you quote as evidence that most, or even a lot of, black people do see Gorman’s poem as “sacred”. Well, one of them is white and, as you point out yourself, both are from religious publications so I remain unconvinced. Here: Quote:
As to John McWhorter’s take, unsurprisingly I agree with a lot of what he says about this. I came across him when I taught (very) basic linguistics to an A Level English class a couple of years ago. I’m no expert and was always just about two pages of the text book ahead of the students. But we had pictures on the wall of McWhorter, Chomsky, Pinker and David Crystal, all of whom were part of the curriculum (the students gave them all nicknames based on their appearance: in order, Smiley, Prof, Hairy and Santa). He seems very smart and a reasonable voice to me. I’m not sure I agree with Jim that he needs to “have the president’s ear”. This is a phenomenon whose trajectory in one way or another is going to be based on people looking into their own hearts with some clear minded honesty. I think it's something politics is best kept out of. After all, Trump claimed to be a big critic of Critical Race Theory (despite probably having no idea what it is) which is poison to anyone reasonably minded who might also express any misgivings about any of its ideas, as popularised by the likes of Robin DiAngelo for example. I also don’t think that this ideology has much to do with “the left” as I understand it and as someone who considers himself to be on the left (if that means things like high-taxation of the very wealthy, public ownership, equality of social opportunity, a strong safety net for the poorest in society) I don’t recognise much of that in the priorities of the people instigating these “cancel culture” spats. Anyway, thanks again, Julie. It’s always a pleasure. Goodness, white people can talk can’t they? |
Hey there, Mark! Cross-posted. But re your final line, I'll confess that I was a little paranoid when I posted the VIDA Count that someone might analyze my word count in this thread compared with everyone else's....
Good, solid counterarguments again, Mark. This weekend I'll reconsider some of of the points you raised. Martin and Jim, Unsurprisingly, since I'm not a fan of John McWhorter anyway, I am less than enthusiastic about his point of view on this subject. He has a very fine mind, but he seems to be missing a heart sometimes. I often get the impression that McWhorter's number one priority when he speaks on race is to battle what might be the main racial injustice that affects him personally--namely, the intolerable notion that anyone might think that he, as a cultured and intellectual Black man at the peak of his career, has anything in common with the lower-class Black men for whom the Black Lives Matter movement is demanding justice: George Floyd, Philando Castile, et al. I concede that that assuming some sort of kinship based solely on the fact that he's a Black man, too, is racist. But it's disappointing that he doesn't seem to feel any sort of kinship just based on the fact that they are fellow human beings. His essays and interviews repeatedly seem to deny these murdered Black men any empathy whatsoever, because he's so busy trying to undermine what he calls the Black Lives Matter movement's portrayal of Black men (and by extension himself) as vulnerable victims in need of protection. McWhorter is wonderfully colorblind in this regard: he doesn't seem to care about the plight of either the Black or the White victims of police violence, except for the purposes of normalizing and trivializing what the police do in lower-class neighborhoods so far from his own that they might as well be hypothetical. By attempting to demonstrate his lack of racism, McWhorter reveals his classism. It seems he is willing to deny others' victimhood just to avoid being mistaken for a pathetic figure himself. But that's not a good look, either. In his essay about the Gorman translation debacle, he attacks ridiculous "liberal" arguments that no liberals actually made by applying these to the translation of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, etc., and then he actually has the nerve to say 'Watch out for the “Nobody said that” game' (regarding Gorman's relationship to white supremacy). I found an article in Medium by Haidee Kotze, a professor of translation studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, far more insightful that McWhorter's take. Some snippets (bolding mine, in case people want to jump to the bit that particularly struck me): Quote:
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Martin, I do agree with McWhorter that there is a religious-seeming fervor to social media "defenestrations," as he puts them (in your two earlier links). The evangelical/crusading nature of fervor even in supposedly non-religious areas isn't a new observation, and McWhorter doesn't pretend it is, since he refers to onetime Eratospherean Jody Bottum's 2014 book on the same phenomenon, and for centuries theists have accused atheists of behaving like zealots whose church is Science and Reason.
The auto-da-fe phenomenon is repeated in various ways throughout human history because it appeals to several common, though unsavory, parts of human nature--the power dynamics of sadism, plus the thirst for social "belonging" and validation, plus the entertainment of a public spectacle, plus individuals' sincere desire to see themselves as good. No political persuasion is immune from that phenomenon. Better to caution everyone against getting swept up in that sort of destructive fervor, rather than singling out either liberals or conservatives. But I'm not convinced that the religious metaphor is apt in this case, as McWhorter's essay claims. As far I know, the critics of the translator choice were not calling for defenestrations and resignations and firings. They issued no threats or demands. They just publicly complained about the missed opportunity. If we are unhappy with Rijneveld's and the various publishers' responses to the controversy, I don't think that their choices can be blamed on the critics. Just as when the critics of a poem workshopped here express unhappiness with the first stanza, and the poet changes it for the worse. That's on the poet who chose an unfortunate response to the criticism, not on the critics themselves. I do very much appreciate what McWhorter has said on some other topics, though. For example, I was happily surprised to see him defend recent trends to adjust English pronouns to accommodate non-binary gender identities--a change which conservatives have spent a lot of energy resisting and ridiculing: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...w-they/568993/ |
Julie, thanks for linking to that article about the singular they. I, too, appreciated what he said about it and enjoyed it.
I wonder what his thoughts are, or if he has written anything about another strange usage. I have noticed lately that more and more people say: “There’s many kinds of vegetables in the produce aisle” instead of “there are many kinds of vegetables in the produce aisle.” I find it lazy, yet it seems almost everybody does it now — in person, on TV, and on the radio. I wonder where that came from. It’s not as socially significant as the singular they. |
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Coleman Hughes on The Case for Color-blindness S2 [Bonus Episode] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq6xJ2vFlaA |
Martin, I agree with most of the substance of what Coleman Hughes says in this video, but the way in which he says it drives me bonkers. Statements like "We are all the same under the skin" and "Skin color is irrelevant" are maddeningly simplistic, to the point of being very unhelpful for any discussion of racism.
Racism, like race, is more than just skin deep. Racial identities--which everyone has, both of ourselves and of everyone else we meet--are based on many things, including but not limited to visible things like skin color, eye shape, lip size, hair texture, etc. There are cultural differences, too. So I really wish that if Hughes MEANS "race and ethnicity" rather than "skin color," he would stop using unhelpful terms like "skin color" and "colorblindness" that suggest that he's only talking about melanin. Yes, Martin Luther King, Jr., did indeed say in 1963, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” However, this is NOT necessarily evidence that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have endorsed the notion of "colorblind" public policy, as defined by people like Coleman Hughes in the 2020s. Martin Luther King, Jr., also said the following in 1968 about reparations for slavery, which to me strongly suggests that he felt race was NOT irrelevant and should NOT be ignored in public policy decisions: Quote:
If Coleman Hughes wants to argue that most policies to address inequity should be based on socioeconomic factors, rather than race, that's great. I actually agree with him about that, for the most part (and also about the important exceptions he identifies, such as recognizing the value of making sure various racial and ethnic communities are represented in police forces, rather than making those hiring decisions without regard to race). But "colorblindness" is a horribly unhelpful term. I was very glad to hear Hughes acknowledge that equality and equity are different things, in his answer to this question. And he even went further to discuss removing the sorts of systemic barriers to equality that make equity programs necessary in order for things to be fair. However, this view is widely shared by people concerned with all sorts of diversity, including disability. Consider this: https://static.diffen.com/uploadz/3/...tice-lores.png And this: https://i.redd.it/4v6005upnt051.jpg Maybe "colorblindness" would say it doesn't matter that no People of Color are represented in the above graphics. But people Hughes would identity with Critical Race Theory still share the above images, to illustrate that both equality and equity are just treating the symptoms of a larger societal disease. Both of these sets of images are focused on eventually finding solutions that address the systemic sources the problem. Hughes himself agrees (see bolding below) that the best solution is to fix an unfair system, rather than to fix the people disadvantaged by an unfair system. And I agree with him that addressing the economic results of racism is more equitable than focusing only on race. But so do most people who are anti-racists, including those he characterizes as CRT proponents. These are pretty standard graphics in diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops. Two sections from the video that I transcribed. Apologies for any typos: Quote:
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As for to the Amanda Gorman translation situation, I think this is clearly one of the exceptional cases like police hiring, in which racial identity matters for reasons of representation. After all, the fact that she is a young, Black, female poet is a large part of why she was chosen by Biden as his Inaugural Poet in the first place. I agree with the Dutch essayist I referred to in an earlier post, who said that Gorman's identity as a young, Black female at this moment of history is part of the message, and that the matter of representation would ideally have been considered in the choice of translator. |
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