The same way you published excerpts of what people responded you can make available parts of your poem that will not affect its potential publishing value. What you’ve presented here is one side of the story. And so the ethical point in question is your lack of accounting for what exactly the peers, who you are charging to be black sympathizers, are responding to. (But also think long and hard about what such a criticism means — what does it mean to feel slighted that people are interested in trying to not have black people get killed indiscriminately).

As far as what you’ve written here: America does not have an obsession with black rights; black people and their allies are the only ones concerned with black rights in America, and that’s why there’s a problem. With reference to the Liang case, you’re unwilling to consider or account for the fact that in this scenario one person is dead and another isn’t. What do we do with that? If we’re getting into the messy and vulgar business of comparing suffering by race (which is infinitely messy and vulgar) think of who is the actual loser in this case. The guy who’s dead, in my opinion. So when you mention the laziness at “blaming” white supremacy, I’d ask how is it less lazy to blame America that you misidentify as being black obsessed? How does this turn into an indictment of pro-blackness and not scrutiny of systemic and structural whiteness? It seems to me you may want to consider the corrupt and racist (across the board) criminal justice system that wants to protect the actions of white officers who perpetrate physical violence disproportionately against black men. How does Liang get implicated in that system in such a way that allows black people and Asian people to not realize their solidarity in being violated in different ways by the same system predicated on (you guessed it) white supremacy? Read a book Courtney. Understandably, this is an emotional issue for you as an Asian person who is a racial minority in America. But read a book. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” comes to mind or Lisa Marie Cacho’s “Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected.” If you’re an ally for anti-racism broadly speaking, it’s confusing to hear you speak about America’s obsession with black rights. In other words, if you’re anti-racism you can’t be anti-pro-black. That doesn’t compute. So where do you stand? You should really try to examine your position precisely in these terms and not hide behind the discourse of the specifics of this case. In case you haven’t noticed, black people remain the most marginalized economically, socially, and politically in America today (these are facts), so it seems to me there’s still work left to be done in terms of racial equality. Certainly this pertains in different ways and degrees to all minorities in America, but what doesn’t need to be done is trying to talk about who needs attention more and when. That’s vulgar and messy because we all, who are not white, need to think about what it means to be pitted against each other even when our interests are shared. Liang killed someone. Accidental or not, someone lost their life. To politicize that person’s death only in terms of what it means to the person who killed him is troubling, but also symptomatic of the ways in which systemic racism and pervasive whiteness prevents us from seeing how we, again who are not white, are considered similarly dispensable.

How you’ve chosen to engage with your peer reviewers here and anonymously says you’re really quite uninterested in working through whatever complexities are present in the piece you write. If you really favor dialogue, excerpts of your work in question are an integral part of sorting through these accusations that you’ve leveled here. It is not clear how, in your mind, pro-blackness translates to or necessarily underwrites being anti-Asian. So are you interested in engaging with this critically, or are you mad that your black peers don’t feel the same as you do that this obsession with blackness in America must end? Can you see how that language might be charged and offensive and insensitive especially when you’re trying to get people to empathize with a killer (accidental or not). So much more to say here, but it would be speculative since, as I’ve pointed out, your piece is not present to gauge proper context.

And finally, there have been instances of white perpetrators in law enforcement getting convicted for killing unarmed black men. If you read you’d know that. So how does that change your stance here?