"But I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise. If I'd pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet's Chinese pseudonym. "If I'd pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world." -- Regardless of the politics, this simply doesn't make sense. Only by keeping the poem in is he denying that he's trying to right past "wrongs." Think about it: He picks the poem for its ethnic markers--the ethnicity is revealed as faked--he pulls the poem. That's totally logical. And this is why I don't really care that much about this particular case: The editor isn't worth arguing against. Two other issues are at stake here: 1. What intersection, if any, should the selection of poems for excellence have with cultural politics? and 2. Is it wrong to assume another ethnicity in art? Regarding 1., I would say that any such selection, implicitly being marked as "the best," is already political. When one book is published for the consumption of all groups, the groups themselves are implicitly compared, and this politico-cultural judgment is reflected in the chosen poems. So I don't support such a project (unless the anthology is subdivided by theme/genre), but given that this project exists, I believe racial considerations should come into play when an ethnically marked poem appears. As for 2., a part of me wants to cry "Death of the author!" and have done with it--but that would be ingenuous. What matters here isn't name or skin color but cultural identification. There have been a number of cases recently of people claiming to be of a race different from their skin color, but we have to remember that race is not a scientific classification, it is a social one: 18th- and 19th-century anthropology merely "uncovered" scientific evidence for racial classifications to support preexisting ideas of racial difference. So since race is a cultural thing, creating art on behalf of "another" race is fine as long as one can relate one's own connections to and artistic inspirations from that race. TL;DR: As long as this white guy is channeling actual ethnic experiences and isn't just making things up, it's fine by me. -- p2: defenestrate --

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