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“racist,” “insensitive,” “ignorant,” “uninteresting,” or “important”

She is trailed by controversy.

Familiar with guilt in all of its forms

“It wasn’t fun for anyone, but it was really good. I think it was very useful for everybody. People said things I’d seen before on social media. Things like, ‘Who is this project for?’ Or, ‘You’re just doing work for white people.’ And I responded to that. I said, ‘It’s not for anyone. I don’t make work for people. That’s presumptuous, to me. I represent things. Somebody else said, ‘You’ve appropriated images of people of color,’ and my argument was, ‘Actually, they’re not images of African Americans, they’re racist imagery that white people made and imposed upon African Americans, therefore they’re my images, they’re my people’s stuff. My work is about taking responsibility for those images and that kind of work. Part of it for me, on an ethical level is: Everybody likes it when I do work on gender because I’m a woman. When I do work on race, people don’t see that I’m also raced. As much as I cannot know what it’s like to have the lived experience of being a person of color, a person of color cannot have the lived experience of being a white American. We need to make that kind of work too, that is historically responsive, that has all of those burdens, and risks.’ So, then this woman, this African American professor said to me, ‘Well, now I just feel like I don’t necessarily think you’re a racist, but I don’t feel like this project goes far enough in interrogating whiteness.’ And I just said, ‘Fair enough.’ Like, that’s fine. We can have that conversation all day long.”

“Part of maturation is learning how to differentiate between your emotions. It’s like when people realize that they’re dating their father, or something. You have these moments of maturity where you realize your emotions may have a cause that isn’t the cause directly in front of you. You’ve actually imported something. For example, during this thing that happened at Boulder, there was a woman who was telling me about the first time she had heard a racial slur. It was when she was being beaten up when she was six. It’s a true association she had. But she’s bringing that into her experience of a work. Aesthetic works aren’t responsible for protecting her from a traumatic memory. There are certain movies I won’t see, but I don’t want to live in a world where those movies can’t be made, or where somebody is always standing outside a movie theater screaming at me not to go in.”

“It was going to cost them more to sue me than to ignore me,” she adds. “We were going to print all of the email correspondence on cotton paper. We had all these thoughts about [the lawsuit]. I changed the cover images [of the manuscripts] because at one point they were all referencing me, because I was really pushing this copyright idea and that didn’t seem to work. When I changed the Twitter avatar to Hattie McDaniel, that was when I was trying to push harder on the race aspect of it, to tag it more as overtly racist, because then I thought, maybe they’ll sue me not because I’m making money, but because I’m sort of making them look bad. That didn’t work either. Then, I was just going along doing my kind of monastic chore of tweeting 10 tweets a day. The last time I was really pushing on it was probably 2012. I didn’t expect that three years later…I’ve done 16,500 tweets or something like that, at this point. You really don’t expect, like, Thursday, you’ll wake up and: ‘This must be stopped.’ In some ways, where were those people six years ago? Part of why I wanted to be sued was that it’s a really long book.” It’s a long book that still sells, Place adds, 250,000 copies a year. “What’s really interesting,” she says, barbell-pierced eyebrow raised, “is that only half of the proceeds stay with the Mitchell heirs. The other half go to the Archdiocese of Atlanta. The Catholic church gets half. We can think about that for a minute. And the critique that the Archdiocese came into recently was that a lot of that money had possibly gone into building this mansion for the bishop. That money was gone…with the wind.”

‘Why is this here? What’s happening? What’s the context, and where is this taking me in my own ability to think about something?’”

a trigger more traumatic, apparently, than the original text it parroted.

“[GWTW] is in part about social media, and the way social media works,” says Place. “And social media is an aesthetic medium. What happens when you have overt antagonism or antagonistic content, on social media? On the surface, it’s so much based on affinity, and liking, and following, and a sense of community. But at the same token, the only way to consistently affirm your community is by having something to rally against. And then we can find out who our friends really are. It’s predicated on [the fact that] we all think the same thing. We don’t go to social media to be confronted by things we don’t understand or don’t agree with, which is maybe why we go to museums, or conferences, or universities. Do we really want museums and galleries, especially museums, to be curating based upon what people know they already like?”

“Apparently, you can have free speech or a community, but not both, which is really interesting,” she says. “It’s complicated, because I feel as if underneath a lot of what’s happening is a very strong push to keep the ideological structures in place. We’ll do anything to have a conference. That’s the most important thing. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about a non-profit.”

“First, when I started the project,” she says, “social media, especially Twitter, was very insular. You had your followers. What happened on Twitter stayed on Twitter. It wasn’t a porous community, which it is now. Second, there’s a kind of vigilance on issues of race and manifestations of racism, especially on social media, more than there was six years ago. And that’s a very good thing. That said—How does the medium itself anticipate in certain kinds of structures? These little tiny sub-groups that we create purify our online communities. If you go to a museum, it’s a different community. It’s heterogeneous in one way, and less so in another way. But what we all know about social media is that it’s designed to keep you safe from the things you don’t want to see. In real life, if you see somebody and you don’t care for them, you still have to somehow engage with them. Online, there’s a whole series of algorithms that keep it from coming to you, even on the level of advertising you’re not interested in. In many ways we’re very happy about that. We love that. We also love the little antagonisms that come up, the pile-on that will happen, the call-outs that will happen. That gets into a really interesting thing in social media which I think is new. Now, you have to say something in order to be seen. You have to like or you have to affirmatively make a comment. And if you don’t, then that can be looked at. The idea of the petition was, ‘Well, why aren’t you signing the petition?’”

When they expressed concern about it, the museum’s response was, ‘We’ve hired bodyguards,’ which didn’t reassure anyone particularly. Everybody was continuing to express their concern, and the institution wasn’t really taking responsibility for the event. It was simply canceled. It’s the failure of the institution to actually be able to respond to disruption, or potential disruption.”

That the art world, too, had rejected Place’s poetry, in a sense, had surprised her most, out of all the cancellations. “One of the things the art world does have is insincerity, and that’s not a bad thing when you’re dealing with representations,” she says. “But the writing world, especially poetry, really trades on sincerity. I mean, my god, it’s like a pipeline, a little snowflake of your soul. Here’s my precious gift. I made a poem and it’s the snowflake of my soul and you bring a snowflake of your soul to the poem and you read it and you go, ‘Yes I have felt that too,’ and that’s the moment. The moment in poetry where people say, ‘Mm.’ And my work has none of that. I’m just as likely to get up and tell rape jokes for thirty minutes from the point of view of the rapist as anything else. And that’s a genre transgression. The more I lie, the more I’m inauthentic, the more I’m transgressing the very things that make being a poet possible. I mean poets, when you sing the song of the pure self, you’re singing the song of Facebook, you’re singing the song of targeted advertising.”

“Life is painful and life is damaging. It just is,” she offers. “But there is one appreciable difference, and a really meaningful difference between young women on colleges being raped, or young black men being shot by police, and discussions about these things, or artistic representations of these things. That signs are symbols and not actual events. It’s like, if you have a nightmare and you wake up and your heart’s pounding. You feel the same as if somebody was in the room when you woke up, but the consequence of you waking up and being alone, scared somebody’s in the room, versus somebody actually being in the room, are very different, and we shouldn’t pretend they’re the same, and say, ‘You have to protect me from that feeling.’ No, you don’t have to protect me from that feeling, you have to protect me from that guy, or that cop. That’s who you have to protect me from.”

“representing rapists and child molesters,”

“Nobody likes these people, nobody. So to me, there’s the State. And the State can lock up whoever the State wants to lock up. That’s the power of the State. If you believe that that power needs to be checked in all instances, that the State needs to have to prove, no matter what, no matter how bad the person is, that it’s the same standard, then that’s who you represent. Not the people that you feel bad for, the people that you really understand, but the people you actually don’t feel bad for, and you don’t understand necessarily.”