White guy named Michael couldn’t get a poem published so he became Yi-Fen Chou

"He sort of implies that minorities are published because we're minorities, not because of our work. That's just insulting."

What Prof. Chang means by this is that she believes minorities are published because of the quality of their work, and anyone who suggests that they're published simply because they're minorities is wrong and motivated by a belief that minorities' work does not stand on its own merits, which would indeed be insulting.

If this white guy announced, "I'm going to use a Chinese-sounding pen name because I think it'll make my poems more likely to be published," then yeah, I think a case could be made that it's insulting, because he would be presuming that minorities' work does not stand on its own merits.

But in this case, the white guy did not make a racist statement. What he did was demonstrate that in at least one case, the Chinese-sounding name did influence whether his poems were published.

So, if it's insulting, it's insulting not because of what this man said or did. Rather, it's insulting on the part of the publications, who did judge the poems on something other than their merits.

Strangely one of the critics considered it wrong that a member of a "traditionally privileged" class pretended to be a member of a less favored class. That despite the fact that Michael's work was consistently rejected under his own name. Apparently in poetry, Chinese is a privileged class and white Americans suffer discrimination yet people believe it's the other way around.

I'm not sure why they are calling him racist - he's not the one judging poems based on author name. The name is not relevant to the content.

This isn't so surprising. Quite a few years ago (when I was doing art installations) I met a couple people (Americans) who had changed their names and accents to sound German or Nordic so that they'd be taken more seriously (and sell more gallery art). Apparently, this had worked for them.

But, is it all so different from my Chinese co-worker who refers to himself by his American name? Or, perhaps even the chain Häagen-Dazs that wanted to be considered as an exotic ice cream maker to the average American?

Art is (and has always been) only what the market will bare.

Donna Chang? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsKpShq2X6s

Trying to grok the criticism.

So English professors are racist, so using a ethic name as a pen name is more racist?

Can't tell if this is an abstract or the full thing, but here's what the poem looks like at least: https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals...

This is pretty interesting. It seems obvious to me though, that one's identity is hugely important in the meaning of any creative endeavor. However it seems equally obvious that a name does not necessarily imply any specific identity!

I'll never understand why names matter in poetry or fiction writing. Maybe it's just me but I usually buy a book or read a poem more on the title than the name of its author.

When you set policy to favor certain genders or races instead of meritocratic ability you open the door for people to cheat the system and deny hardworking talented people who don't fit into your favored groups. Chinese Americans have parity or higher average income, college graduation rate, etc than European Americans for some time.Clearly there was some selection criteria to favor certain groups which outweighed merit in this case.

Of course this is considered big news. However the statistically measured significant bias against marginalised groups isn't even mentioned in the story.

One white man does better under a different name and that is enough for a whole article in the Washington Post. The article doesn't even mention the wider context of studies on implicit bias / blind reviews and so on.

Terrible victim blaming from the poetry community here.