How Tony Hoagland Renames Hate as Change

Some people like to say these days that we are post-race.

Photo: Native Notes

I guess that’s a way of being nice. As in, talking nice in nice company.

Photo: Meal a Day

That’s not a new idea. That’s an old idea. In the days of slavery, people talked nice, too.

Now why and when would talking nice presuppose that there are no longer issues of racial injustice in the United States of America?

Photo: Newton Pentacle

It is upon this zeitgeist of frustrating silence that Hoagland seizes the platform to reintroduce the old time imagery of hatred and hackneyed stereotypes in collusion with racist violence.

Hoagland is currently in plenty of company. The reactionary response to the “talking nice” misnomer of “post-race” is mistaking “shock talk” with “truth.” Mistaking rudeness for truth is like mistaking loud volume for virtuosity. It does not make any sense. It creates an illogical autocracy of fear.

Americans have fallen ill with the idea that shouting their feelings, an individual truth is communicating a or the “truth.” Giving credence to subjective truths for a moment, this trend is nonetheless ignorant of the fact that any “reality” is made up of many subjective realities. Wherein a country with a history of slavery experiences racial injustice, it is those harmed by racism whose subjective realities are cropped out, silenced or beaten down. One subjective “reality” is never “the truth,” no matter how loudly or earnestly it is shouted.

Thus, the shock value of Hoagland’s poem “change” is no more true than the rehistories spun by Glenn Beck or other subjective shouters (who are not-very-much-in-love with fact-checking).

Photo: William K Wolfrum

The reaction to the Hear No Evil See No Evil Speak No Evil “Post-Race” movement is not counterbalanced but really dangerously more unbalanced by this trend of conflating shock value insults with “truth.” Glenn Beck is the Captain of this ship, it appears. But there are first mates and sailors on the ship of shouting shit even in academia, among writers. And the purport is menacing. The insults, neither purgative nor ameliorative, pave the way for significant harm.

Volume, insult or shock value have no correlation to truth. Like Amina Annabi sings, “The last one to speak in your house is the one who is right.” And of course, as Ella Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter, we know that “it ain’t necessarily so.”

The flag waving example of academic shit talk this season appears to be Tony Hoagland’s poem, “Change,” which has annoyed writers and thinkers for about a year now. In it, he refers to the Black female body of Venus Williams as “it,” thereby stripping her of her humanity.

Hoagland refers to her behind as a “flank” thereby equating her to an animal and bringing back slave block terminology resurrecting the precepts that made it possible, conceptually, for Black people to be inhumanely examined and sold like livestock.

Image: Miles Teves

Hoagland renames Venus Williams “Vondella Aphrodite.” Renaming is another slave practice brought back by Hoagland in this poem. The systematic eradication of identity and self-worth is effected by renaming a person without their consent.

Image: Western Michigan University: Oroonoko

Photo: Ask Men

Hoagland pits Venus Williams against a white female tennis player depicted as fragile – the stereotypical white female eliciting white male protective instincts. In this old script the Venus Williams character becomes the dragon for the prince to slay in order to save the lily white and delicate princess. Since Helen of Troy, women have been used as pawns to incite war. Hoagland uses this old trick like a hack by whipping out a handy and old cliché instead of doing the work with language to depict a complex moment or reality.

His depiction of Venus Williams is animalistic, monstrous, vengeful. He bemoans that the Black female athlete does all this “without asking permission.” He writes of the Emancipation Proclamation being “shoved down Abraham Lincoln’s throat.”

The argument is not whether or not the poem is racist – of course it is.
But some writers mostly male – Black and White – have argued that it takes balls to bring up racism and issues of race so boldly. (I don’t even want to get into that metaphor’s implication that it requires testicles to have courage, so we’ll let that one go.)

But what Hoagland has done is not by any shape of the imagination a courageous act. It is not courageous writing at all. It takes courage to write in a new voice, present new options, to call out injustice correctly and kindly. Repeating old stereotypes are as easy as falling out of a tree.

It takes courage to be kind and patient in the face of cruelty. Being mean has never been a hallmark of courage. We knew in elementary school that bullies were really just cowards, recycling old threats because they did not have the ability to think for themselves or choose a braver, kinder or more analytical and perceptive path.

The lack of perception in the poem “Change” results in cartoonish representations of human beings. Venus Williams is so flattened that it is difficult to imagine that she is a real human being.

Since the holocaust, it has been understood very clearly that dehumanization paves the way for human rights violations and even murder. In order to harm or kill a person or group of people, the killer must first somehow see his victim as not-human. Hoagland opens the door wide to harm by dehumanizing Venus Williams. This too is an old practice, deeply racist, violent, cowardly, and disturbing.

Tony Hoagland is not depicting change in his poem of the same name.
That readers settle for old stereotypes instead of new constructions when addressing issues of race, only speaks to the hunger to talk about race. Readers settle for Hoagland because they don’t know what else to do – don’t know how to open conversations about race without playing the hackneyed stereotypes over and over again. Feeling afraid, they simply step into the shoes of the cowardly bully.

I don’t see much merit in this. There is nothing purgative nor ameliorating about exposing hatred by embodying and furthering it. It accomplishes nothing but hatred.

The poem implies and invites an old violence. It is easy to see what the poem does. Is it reflecting a reality? No. The names are not real. It is Tony Hoagland’s reality, but spun through the distorted view of the body of Venus Williams.

Sadly, there are some readers who defend the poem by stating that it exposes how things are. I have trouble swallowing the myth of objectivity and the omniscient narrator. To that, I can only quote Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

It is an old violence to use the body of a Black person to accomplish the work of a white person. That Hoagland seizes and destroys the identity of Venus Williams to do the work of his poem makes it a sort of creative and academic slavery.

It is a white male narrator using a Black female body as object, conflating her humanity with monstrosity and violence.

It’s not the truth, and it’s not change. It’s an old stereotype the platform upon which Black women have been abused and killed inside and outside of slavery for three hundred years.

I don’t understand how embodying the voice of the fearful, hateful racists represents change. We’ve heard that voice before, a few million times, for a few hundred years.

A poem that addresses race and racism by accurately depicting a reality and asking what can be done to repair what has gone wrong may appropriately be entitled, “Change.” Hoagland’s poem is more appropriately entitled, “Hate.” But to call it what it is, there would have to be an admission of racist hatred, and said admission is sadly absent from the poem.

Since how my friends and heroes are is just more interesting and less hateful than Hoagland, I will leave you with some other writers to read on this same topic:

Tara Betts quoting the hilarious Craig Perez:

Claudia Rankine (Click “AWP”), who had the courage to stand up and critique Hoagland at the recent AWP conference.

Lastly, please keep up with my friend the brilliant and sassy poet and writer,Honorée Fannone Jeffers. I thank her for talking with me honestly and compassionately about race and racism in America. Her sharp intellect and insight are valuable to me beyond words.

Laura Hartmark is a writer who has left academia for the time being, and has little patience for bullshit parading as academic discourse.