“Vanessa Place has been doing challenging work on racism, or “racist work,” depending on whom you ask, for years. In 2009, Poetry magazine, the most prestigious journal in the field, published a poem of Place’s that appropriated the Prissy “bringin’ babies” speech — famously racist language — from Gone With the Wind, just as the Twitter account used as evidence of Place’s racism by MCAG does. Prestige, of course, does not in itself exonerate the work, but this early publication made her work on race widely known. The Twitter project began the same year, and has been active since, with Place producing six years of near-daily tweets. Throughout, the account’s avatar has been a publicity still from the film version of the novel — a photograph of Hattie McDaniel, the actress who played “Mammy,” in costume. Place’s use of the image in large part seems to account for the Mongrel Coalition’s assertion that Place “wears blackface.” The account’s background photo is a similarly racist caricature taken from the sheet music for “Jemima’s Wedding Day,” a minstrel song. The images, perhaps more so than the accompanying text feed, are undeniably racist and painful to witness, making an attack on Place easy to launch — her critics frequently utilize screenshots throughout social media. Many people, certainly more than had initially been following Place’s Twitter, encountered the images with only the context provided by the Mongrel Coalition, as exemplified in the above tweet.

To complicate matters further, the Gone With the Wind Twitter account is not the only work by Place that engages with racist material. Along with fellow panelists Douglas Kearney, Cathy Park Hong, Ronaldo Wilson, and Daniel Tiffany, Place also participated in an AWP-adjacent event in 2014 that was ejected from Seattle’s Frye Art Museum but found a home elsewhere. Entitled “Coon Songs, Kitsch, and Conceptual Writing,” the improvisational performance explored the history of so-called “coon songs” and their aesthetic and political implications. Tiffany and Place are white Americans; Kearney and Wilson are African American; Cathy Park Hong is Korean-American. At this event, Place performed part of a piece that had previously been part of a performance/presentation in 2012 at New York University on the minstrel show. Another performance, a recording of which MCAG damningly posted on their Twitter, entitled “What What Nigger,” has been performed at a number of venues, including CU Boulder in 2012 and Brown University in 2013. The poem is comprised of quotations from legal documents in which the word “nigger” was used to prove something: either that the crime was a hate crime (the word shouted before the attack) or that the two defendants were allies (the word said between them as a mark of affection). As Place has said, the law always uses the word as proof of guilt. In addition to a poet, Place is also a criminal defense attorney who represents indigent sex offenders on appeal, and has previously published and performed works using courtroom materials. One might say, in reviewing some of her recent projects, that her choices have made the case easy for the current prosecution.”

The Denunciation of Vanessa Place by Kim Calder