<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.”</p>
<p>I think that’s exactly right. Yes, there is plenty of racial humor on Saturday Night Live, etc., but I haven’t ever seen a joke based around the idea that lazy/stupid black kids can get whatever they want without working hard for it. Maybe that’s because there aren’t a lot of racists working at Saturday Night Live. The last time I heard that sentiment, it was coming out of the mouth of a white kid making a fool out of himself in the Borat movie. It sounded just as ugly there as it does here.</p>
<p>There are plenty of non-racist reasons to disagree with affirmative action, but the Primary Source didn’t put any of them into its satire. If you compare the kids at BU giving out the whites-only scholarship as an AA protest, I think that satire likewise missed the mark, but they managed to make their point without directing explicit insults at every single black freshman at BU.</p>