As an artist, googling myself is an exercise in stroking and killing my ego. I have found some cool things and, some well less cool things. There were several large publications that had at least marginally mentioned me, but one mention in particular, from the Washington Post, caught my eye. While the reason I was in the Post was somewhat admirable, what that [redacted] wrote about me had me heated enough that when I saw it again two years later, yesterday, I had to stop and email good ole Hannah Natanson. It was a short stanza but long enough to make me angry enough to make sure she knew exactly why.
I want to make it clear; this is not something I had been seething over for two years, but when I initially saw it, I was bothered, and then when I saw it again, I was still very bothered and realized exactly why.
“He navigated to YouTube and pulled up ‘White Privilege,’ a scathing and profane four-minute poetry performance by Kyla Jenée Lacey. ‘Oh, am I making you uncomfortable?” The Black writer demands at one point. ‘Try a cramped slave ship.”
There has got to be a meme for how I felt when reading that. The article was about a white teacher, Matthew Hawn, who was fired for sharing my poetry with his class. Hannah is allowed to not like my work. She is even allowed to critique it but in an objective piece about school teachers being fired for doing their jobs, the only time she had any judgment was when she talked about my work, a work, I might add, that has been translated into multiple languages, used as college curriculum and used in protest signs in countries I have yet to visit, that same work Hannah labeled “profane,” “scathing” and “demanding.”
Hannah Natanson is an education reporter—she is not an arts and entertainment reporter—she is an education reporter. Her recent publications are all essentially the same, ‘teacher gets fired for teaching about Black people being done wrong.’ Which makes my ire with her that much more visceral. The poem “White Privilege,” is 3:29 seconds of an impassioned poetry performance about the ills of racism, and somehow, I guess I was supposed to be sweet about a thing that has never been sweet to me. That poem has well over 50 million views worldwide, and while it was my first poem to get millions of views, it was not my last or second to last. Spoken Word is a niche art, so I have no expectations that Hannah would be familiar with me, but I am at the top of my field and superior at what I do. So, it’s very irritating that a white reporter would choose to deviate from her message and view my work with the same eyes as the racists whom she claims to be working against just because she was too lazy to do her f*cking googles.
Whether intentional or not, In just a few sentences, Hannah managed to paint me as an angry Black woman and subpar artist on an unintelligible rant that made four minutes seem ‘four’ever, even though the actual performance is less than three and a half. The quote that really pushed me over the edge was, “’Oh, I am making you uncomfortable?’ the artist demands.”
Do you even know how a f*cking question mark works, Hannah?
Oh wait, let me not use a curse word; I would not want you to paint me as profane. While I concede that my four-minute rant (depending on who is counting) is not nearly as long as his novel, my poem says the inward 218 times less than Huckleberry Finn and I would imagine that the relationship between a young white boy and a slave involved a demand or two. I doubt that the education reporter would have used those words to describe the pen of Samuel Clemens, even though the book and my poem were both about the ills of racism.
It is true that part of the controversy over Matthew being fired was my usage of curse words. There are four curse words in the poem, five if you count “ass.” The other part of the controversy is that Matt (I call him Matt because friendships form under the oddest circumstances) was previously warned when he gave his Current Events students a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay, and showing my poem was the final straw for the all-white school board in the mostly white Tennessee county of Sullivan. The school district also claimed that we were not credible sources; it is one thing to say I am not a credible source, but Ta-Nehisi Coates??!?! Oh, come the f*ck on. The hearing for Matt was a mindf*ck; imagine sitting at a table of all white people who do not believe you are a credible source to your own f*cking experience but I’m sure some white man is *laughs* ‘That’s white privilege.’
My favorite part of the hearing was when the lawyer for SCSB, Chris McCarty’s, face dropped after I responded, “a B.A. in history,” when his question, which attempted to paint me as uneducated, did not go as he had rehearsed in the mirror. With those few sentences, Hannah was no better than the Chris McCartys she writes about. The virality of that poem was a gift and a lot of curses.
The comments sections were filled with angry white racists, with such salient arguing points as “your stupid,” not you’re stupid, but the possessive one, and attacks on my education or lack thereof, and saying that I needed to learn my history. Yes, people who don’t know the difference between your and you’re, were telling someone with a history degree how she needed to learn her history. To them, I was not stupid because they did not like what I had to say. I was stupid because
I was a Black woman saying it.
Globally, my race is viewed as the most intellectually inferior; globally, my gender is viewed as the most intellectually inferior. As a Black woman, I am doubly marginalized when it comes to assumptions about my intellect. As a Black artist, I am not smart enough to be concerned with anything outside of the ‘profane.’ White people never have to prove how smart they are; it is automatically assumed until they prove otherwise. Black people always have to prove that we aren’t dumb; it is automatically assumed until proven otherwise. The commenters’ blind assumption is that I either went to a subpar school or that I am inherently intellectually inferior. That logically means they either agree that the public school system is racist, or they must concede that they are, but myopia disallows people to be able to think that far away.
I highly doubt that the your/you’re crowd makes up the bulk of Hannah’s readership but her dismissive and lazy explanation of a poignant piece about racism only fueled the fire she claims to be attempting to quench. Racism predicates itself on the notion that the dumbest white person is still smarter than the smartest Black person, while Hannah’s readers may not think that on the surface, they still live in a society that constantly supports that sentiment, especially when Black art is written about with such trivialization.
Hannah does not need to like my art, not everyone has good taste, but her flinging words onto her computer that only support the stereotype of an angry Black woman on an expletive fueled rant, which is nothing but fodder for racism and the dangerous characterization she claims to oppose. I do not need Hannah’s validation, she is no one important to me, but unlike her, I won’t invalidate her importance to her audience or to mine because I am intelligent enough to realize that just because something is not relevant to me does not make it irrelevant. When given the opportunity to say nothing, she purposely deviated outside of her job description as an education writer to undermine and wax unpoetic about a poem that has had a larger global reach than anything she’s ever written.
Her work is important but what she failed to realize is that artists, like myself, are also important to those little Black kids she makes a paycheck writing about. And as one of my favorite lines in the poem goes, “you’re not racist because you don’t use the n-word, but y’all use n*ggas every day.”
Happy Black History Month, Hannah!
