<p>lolabelle,</p>
<p>I think that many readers of this thread would accept all of your contentions: that the author doesn’t harbor any overt ill-will toward African-Americans; that this is poor satire; that the text was conceived for a particular audience and context; and that some minority members of the Tufts community are comfortable at Tufts and even willing to shrug this incident off.</p>
<p>But it’s possible to accept all of that and still see the poem as deeply offensive and racist. It perpetuates the cruelest sorts of racial sterotypes, and the fact that these characterizations were probably unthinking makes them no less pernicious. It was certainly read as racist by many members of the Tufts community. It would have taken almost no foresight to realize that many readers, both on and off the Tufts campus, would find this objectionable to a degree that no appeals to free speech or satire can excuse. In short, the poem showed a kind of insensitivity that deserves to be identified for what it is and condemned whenever it happens: it was the kind of subtle (actually this was not-so-subtle), internalized racism that’s replaced the more overt racism of the past.</p>