Once again, this will be a long post as I try to unpack the
problems with a rambling article in the Huffington Post today that responds to
the issues that began on HuffPo in an article by Kate Gale several weeks ago. This
current article by Carol Muske-Dukes veers from Kate Gale’s original HuffPo article
to terrorism (with accusations comparing those opposed to Gale’s article to
ISIS) to an article in The Atlantic to free speech and the First Amendment to standup
comedians to AWP to Muske-Dukes’s youthful engagement with teaching in the
prison system to Stalin to “triggering” warnings to Dorothy Parker to the
University of New Hampshire to “enduring” values and rights to censorship and
alleged death threats to Straight Outta
Compton to the Kurdish women fighters to Mandelstam and on and on. Oh, and
of course, “political correctness,” that tired, old canard from the Newt Gingrich/Jesse
Helms-era culture wars against writers and intellectuals that has so
steadfastly refused to die.
First, let’s back up and revisit the original article by
Kate Gale for those of you who didn’t see it or have blessedly forgotten it. I
wrote a blog post about it and included screen shots of her article, which is
important because the article has been deleted and replaced with an abortive
apology, which was later supplemented with a fuller, still non-apologetic
apology. I have given a detailed
timeline with links of what led up to this article, “AWP Is Us,” and what led
from it (at least up to the time I posted this blog). I’ve also posted the
screenshots of “AWP Is Us” on this blog
for your convenience.
As you may note, in that blog post there is no threat of
violence toward Gale. If you go to the link for what was the original article
and then became the first “apology,” you can still read the many, many
comments. I haven’t read all of them but
have read the first hundred or so. There’s no threat of violence toward Gale.
Most of the comments are well-reasoned and articulate commentary on a
troublesome piece of writing. If you follow the other links to other blog posts
and articles about the controversy, you will find no threats of violence. I’ve
read many more blogs and essays about this than are linked in my blog, and all
of them have been well-reasoned and articulate without any threat of violence.
There may well have been some threat of violence somewhere, but although I’ve
read a huge number of internet article comments, blog posts, articles, essays, Facebook
posts, and tweets concerning the Gale article, I have seen not one threat of
physical violence, not even in the heated discussions of it that have taken
place in private Facebook groups for writers of color. I urge my readers to
google “AWP Is Us” and “Kate Gale AWP” and read all the various commentary for
themselves. Violent threats are obviously not the common tenor of the
opposition to Gale’s column, although Muske-Dukes would try to make it seem so.
Unfortunately, Muske-Dukes seems to have particularly
conflated Gale’s article, stand-up comedians, and the First Amendment in a most
bizarre way. First of all, freedom of speech, as guaranteed by the First
Amendment, is the constitutional right of a publisher to publish even
controversial work without official interference from the government. It does
not guarantee that readers will not take issue with the published work. It does
not even guarantee the right of an author to be published if a press does not
choose to publish her/him. It is narrowly focused around banning official
government-supported censorship of publishers and has been expanded to cover
the government’s inability to officially stop most kinds of oral speech, even
if offensive. No government official made any attempt to prevent the Huffington
Post from publishing Gale’s article. Gale is not a stand-up comedian in front
of a live audience, so the many odd references to various stand-up comedians
and the suggestion that comedy is dead because of the opposition to Gale’s
piece make no sense, at all. As a matter of fact, Gale herself, in her later apology,
has called her article a failed attempt at humor.
Perhaps one of the most irksome parts of Muske-Dukes’s
article is her assumption that Gale’s critics are not activists and are not
doing anything for the community.
“But I'm inclined to ask the ‘virtual vigilantes’ if they
have ever started a press or a membership organization, if they've gone into
the prisons to teach -- or if they've tried to do stand-up? Instead of weeping,
why not figure out how to be strong?”
I know many of the people who have articulately opposed Gale’s
stereotypes with comments, blog posts, essays, etc. We have started and run
presses and membership organizations and reading series. We have gone into
prisons and jails and juvenile detention centers to teach—and inner-city
schools and domestic-violence shelters and homeless shelters and among migrant
workers and on reservations and elsewhere. I have myself done all of those. Most
of us still are doing such things. The assumption that only white privileged
academics do anything for the community is both false and foolish.
Another assumption she also makes is that no one who opposed
Gale’s article opposed the erasing of women and the misogyny of the movie, Outta Compton. Once again, Muske-Dukes
is drastically incorrect, apparently not having bothered to research her
accusation before making it. The
Washington Post had an article by Jamilah Lemieux discussing the fact that
all the critical praise for the movie was coming from white male critics.
And there’s much more that can be easily googled.
Now, we come to the really foolish hyperbole. Some of it
lies in the above quote from the article—“virtual vigilantes.” But it gets much
worse.
“What,
I asked myself, had Kate Gale done to piss off Isis?
Here's
how she pissed off (if not Isis itself) those unwittingly willing to take
ideological instruction (in the cause of self-righteousness) from the M.O. of
extremism. “
“I'm
talking about women who actually fight and kill members of Isis! Though they
live in the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan -- an area beset by tragedy
and oppression -- these women use Isis' misogyny against them. They are the
Kurdish women fighters who fashion a military strategy on the belief of these
Muslim extremists that if they are killed by a woman they cannot go to heaven
(so forget the 72 virgins!) -- so if they see a female fighter coming at them,
they run like hell. This is a desperate situation but it is also funny --
unless perhaps you're too P.C. to laugh. Instead of weeping, why not recruit
yourself to go over there and join forces with women who really know the meaning
of the comedy term, ‘to kill’?”
So,
if we have issues with Gale’s use of racist stereotypes for “humor,” we are
terrorists, members of ISIS, “willing to take ideological instruction… from the
M.O. of extremism”? I would like to note that, to my knowledge, no one tried to
even imply that Kate Gale was a terrorist, a member of ISIS, or taking
ideological instruction from terrorists. But that is the accusation Muske-Dukes
levies against anyone who has problems with Gale using the genocide of our
ancestors as a joke to hold us up for ridicule. As Kimberly Gail Wieser
comments on Muske-Dukes’s article, “. . . and there's just a little historical
irony in making jokes about the American Holocaust and then calling us
terrorists if we defend ourselves when other people were the ones utilizing
violent language. Just saying.”
Also,
to suggest that we must somehow prove our genuineness, non-terrorist-ness, and non-PC-ness
by volunteering to go over to the Middle East and join up with the Kurd women
warriors who are fighting against Turkey and ISIS is so bogus that it’s truly
laughable. It’s as if Muske-Dukes believes that only those with white privilege
are allowed to criticize anything in this society without making some
extraordinary effort to “deserve” that right. How dare we people of color,
LGBTQ people, people with disabilities even open our mouths, right? Well, we
dare. And we shall go right on speaking out when we see people employing racist,
homophobic, ableist stereotypes.
The
sad thing is that many people within AWP’s diversity communities were so
disgusted with the whole situation before that they wanted to withdraw from
AWP. There have been calls that we should break away and form our own
organization or go to another organization that’s more welcoming of diversity. Along
with many others, I’ve been trying to persuade people not to run away but to
stay and work with AWP to make things better. We’ve pulled together all the diversity
caucuses to try to work things out and keep people from bolting in large
numbers. A piece like Muske-Dukes’s undoes a lot of that work and causes us to
start all over again.
How
often must we go through this? If this keeps up, soon enough, even those of us
who keep saying, “Not all of the white lit hierarchy thinks that way—we need to
stay and work things out,” will have to agree that “yes, they just want us to
shut up and take whatever they dish out.”
