Know Your Lane

The Nation in July published a short poem “How-To” by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poem will not be remembered as a great work of art, but it is easy to see why it appealed to the editors at The Nation. As Carlson-Wee explained, he “intended for this poem to address the invisibility of homelessness.” Speaking from the position of a black homeless person, the poem offers advice for beggars on how to tug at the heartstrings of petit-bourgeois marks.

“If you’re young say younger.

Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t

flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough

Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,

say you sin. It’s about who they believe

they is. You hardly even there.”

Carlson-Wee, who it must be said is white, seems to have had his heart in the right place, showing his sympathy with the homeless and his contempt for those who offer charity in order to boost their self-esteem. Or at least that is what he and the editors at The Nation thought. Until the gates of the twitterverse loosed a tsunami of moral condemnation, as Jennifer Schuessler reports in The New York Times:

“But after a firestorm of criticism on social media over a white poet’s attempt at black vernacular, as well as a line in which the speaker makes reference to being “crippled,” the magazine said it had made a “serious mistake” in publishing it.

“We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities…