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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3148 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: When White Poets Pretend to be Asian

I heard about this guy yesterday on the radio. At first I thought he just saw an opportunity to be published more easily if he was an Asian, but then I thought about how worthless I would feel if that's how my work was published. For any amount of time, if his work is published in the future it will be based on this controversy and the fact that people will want to judge his work for themselves.

Here's the poem by the way. It's pretty bad. No coherent message of any novel worth (the world is stupid and I'm wasting my time, thanks for the insight. No one gives a shit about you or your time in the first place so why would anyone care about your view on the world. That's blog level shit) and just contrived in general. The kind of poetry that makes kids hate poems because they look so easy to write and worthless to read. More than anything that's the important part. The poem wasn't very good, and it got published because it was written by a minority. That's bad for a lot of reasons.

So if my work was published as his was, I would immediately question whether or not it was published because it was quality, or because I submitted it under an alternate identity. To me the question would be unanswerable and torturous. This on its face would be immediately worth not being published, or improving my work to the point that being a white man would not be an impediment to my publication.