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Why poetry and race? After all, race, in the sense of biobehavioral essences passed from parents to children, doesn't even exist. In the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah, genetics has shown that genes "are not inherited in racial packages," "so there are, sensu stricto, no races."1 But as a cultural category that constructs social difference, race not only exists; it's one of the most significant aspects of our lived experience. It shapes, styles, even gives rise to various forms of aesthetic enunciation, including poetry. Racism—the view that race explains natural differences in human abilities that make some people better or worse than others—is more publicly visible now than at any time since the civil rights era. Xenophobia continues to surge from the Americas to Western Europe, and from Eastern Europe to South and Southeast Asia. In the United States, a country that now bars entry to travelers from a number of Muslim majority nations, black and brown people still suffer disproportionately high rates of employment, rent discrimination, educational barriers, incarceration, child mortality, and violent death. At the home institution of New Literary History, on August 11, 2017, torch-wielding, hate-spewing, anti-Semitic, antiblack racists from at least thirty-nine states swarmed the University of Virginia's Lawn, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The next day in Charlottesville, a neo-Nazi murdered an antiracist protestor with a car, injuring many others. Like other progressive cities, Charlottesville had finally sought to take down statues installed as symbols of white supremacy, and like other institutions of higher education, UVa had finally been wrestling with its complicity in the long history of racial injustice. The contradictions of racial thinking are written into UVa's DNA: the institution's founder as well as one of the nation's, Thomas Jefferson, was a race-theorizing slaveholder whose words have inspired antiracist leaders of liberation struggles from India and Vietnam to the American South.
Why poetry and race? Over the last decade a series of high-profile controversies in American letters—which can be briefly, if incompletely, enumerated—have welded the discourses together in public perception, at least in the US. In two incidents in 2011, an African American poet and white writers openly contended over racist diction and aesthetic value. At the Association of Writers & Writing Programs...