The Latest Identity Politics Scandal
13th September 2015
We missed noting the story reported in the Washington Post late last week about an aspiring poet named Michael Derrick Hudson of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was having trouble getting his poetry accepted in any poetry journals. So what did he do? Pretended to be Chinese….
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I’ve been thinking for a while that if people can self-identify as anything (gender or race) that they want, then everyone should start declaring themselves to be a racial minority (except Asian—the only officially disfavored minority) on college applications, mortgage loan applications, Census forms, etc, until this whole corrupt edifice collapses.
September 13th, 2015 at 22:05
Slate says he’s a cheater, and a bad poet. That is, he’s gaming poetry’s affirmative action, and, for a white man, his poetry sucks.
September 14th, 2015 at 01:47
Of course he’s gaming poetry’s affirmative action. That he felt it necessary to do so, and that he felt that it was advantageous to do so, is the core of the scandal.
‘Affirmative action’ is what lawyers call an ‘attractive nuisance’.