When Shane McCrae, poet and professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, saw Vanessa Place’s arguably racist Twitter feed, he decided to write a letter. He wrote to the head of the writing conference AWP, expressing his concerns about Vanessa Place’s position on a selection committee that would determine panels for a future conference. Then McCrae sent the letter to some of his friends, whom he thought might want to write letters of their own. Someone suggested a petition be written, one that would incorporate some of McCrae’s language. Thus the petition to remove Place from her position was born.

Writers sympathetic to Place's conceptual art project are calling this censorship and asking that AWP reinstate Place on the panel-selecting subcommittee. Fellow poet and Place defender Ron Silliman even went so far as to equate the signers of the petition to the cop who killed Mike Brown. Other writers had the opposite point of view. 
I wanted to see what Shane McCrae had to say all this, and he agreed to talk. We talked over Facebook chat.

Do you view the petition and your letter to AWP as a form of censorship?

SM: Not at all! And I worry very much about that line of criticism. One wouldn't want D. W. Griffith, were it possible, to direct a Martin Luther King jr. biopic because he would be dangerously unsuited to the job, and were he instead hired to be a part of a committee of people who were to choose a director for a Martin Luther King jr. biopic, one would hope whoever hired him would come to their senses eventually and fire him. That would not be censorship—D. W. Griffith could go on to make a Martin Luther King jr. biopic if for some reason he wanted to—it would merely be an organization determining that a person hired to do a job was not, after all, the right person for the job and letting that person go. That's what happened to Vanessa Place, and it isn't censorship.

AWP said they fired Vanessa Place not because she wasn't right for the job, but because, "AWP must protect the efficacy of the conference subcommittee’s work." The efficacy of the work would suffer presumably because of the controversy surrounding her. How do you feel about that statement?

SM: I understand why AWP worded that statement in that particular way, and I'm not bothered by it. My goal wasn't to get AWP to remove Vanessa Place from her position and to call her a racist after doing so. My goal was to let AWP know that it was very problematic for Vanessa Place to be on that particular subcommittee. I wouldn't have a problem with Vanessa Place working for AWP in some capacity that didn't give her that kind of authority over people of color.

With @VanessaPlace, Place claims she's using racist imagery and text from Gone with the Wind in order to foreground the book’s racism and also to make white people feel pain about their complicity in white supremacy. It seems as if her views align with those who believe that white supremacy is bad. Why not let her have authority over panel proposals submitted by people of color?

SM: Because she does not seem to draw the line at instrumentalizing black suffering in order to achieve her goals. Her goals might be noble—I'll take her statements at face value—but I don't think the ends justify the means.

If she doesn't understand why that project might show insufficient sensitivity to the concerns of people of color, she is not well-suited for a position on that subcommittee. If she DOES understand why that project might show insufficient sensitivity to the concerns of people of color and goes through with the project anyway, she is not well-suited for a position on that subcommittee.

Why is instrumentalizing black suffering such a problem if one of the goals of the piece is to get people to think about the ways in which they instrumentalize black suffering?

SM: You can't fight dehumanization by dehumanizing.

How does retyping Gone with the Wind dehumanize people?

SM: By instrumentalizing the suffering the book has caused.

Is there a difference, to you, between instrumentalizing Gone with the Wind and instrumentalizing people’s suffering provoked by bringing up Gone with the Wind?

SM: Certainly, but the project as it has been executed collapses that difference.

But she intends for it to be a brutal critique on white supremacy, right?

SM: Unfortunately, some black people seem to feel like they have been brutalized by the project.

Why isn't the hurt justified, in this case?

SM: How does one justify hurting black people to teach white people a lesson?

Place's justification is: "Some art offends, and sometimes it is the job of art to be offensive because the world art mirrors and moves is offensive." The use of the imagery, she says, is in the service of revealing the racism of the text.

SM: 1. Although I agree that it is sometimes the job of art to be offensive, that doesn't justify every offense. In fact, the idea that it is the "job" of art to be offensive doesn't actually justify ANY offense. It is the job of a professional assassin to kill—does that justify the assassin's murders? 2. The racism of Gone with the Wind doesn't need to be revealed—it is apparent.

Place is trying to draw a suit for copyright infringement. If they wanted to, Margret Mitchell’s estate could sue her for hundreds of millions of dollars. She could lose everything she owns doing this. Though it's very unlikely, if she wins the court case she says the proceeds from GWTW might best go to reparations in some way. Would those ends justify the means?

I can't speak for black folks as a whole—some people might believe the ends would justify the means were that to come to pass, some people might not. I myself am not sure.


That kind of money could do a lot of good. But psychic scars don't heal easily, and their effects manifest years down the line. I think the project has caused a lot of pain; I know it has shaken my faith in the poetry community. I would not and do not want the project censored, but I don't know that it's morally justifiable.

In what way has your faith in the poetry community been shaken?

Here I guess it would make sense to just reprint what I wrote on Facebook a few days ago:

Have I ever told you I was raised by white racists? Some of you I've told, I know, but not all of you. Well, I was. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and I find myself thinking about it even more frequently now that this whole Vanessa Place thing is raging. Probably you can’t tell by looking at my poems, but I came into the game enthralled by progressive poetry and poets—by what, I guess, I feel a little silly calling the “avant-garde.” I’ve always thought of them as the cool kids, and I’ve always wanted them to like me—a little desperately, actually, a little pathetically. And I read their books whenever I could, and OMG I looked up to Perloff, especially—in fact, I read “21st-Century Modernism” in the months before I started at Iowa specifically because I thought everybody there would be smarter than me (they were), and I wanted to fortify myself. And I was completely unaware of the racism that infects so much avant-garde work and workers—maybe because of how I was raised? And now—I have to be real with you—I’m just so sad, and I’m getting sadder every day. I hurt and am angry alongside and with other people of color and our allies about this situation. But I find myself also, selfishly, overwhelmed by the feeling that something is broken between me and the people I want most to approve of me, and something has always been broken, and I loved them before I knew it.

Is it really "brutalizing" to just see a few racist images and read some re-typed text? People see terrible images all the time. Aren't the words "hurt" and "in pain" and "suffering" a little hyperbolic?

SM: Hyperbolic? They don't seem hyperbolic to me—they seem merely accurate. Again, I can only speak for myself, but when I first encountered the project I instantly felt hurt by it, and other people have reacted to the project in ways that suggest that they, too, have been hurt by it. That's enough for me.