Should White Men Stop Writing? A Q&A With Elisa Gabbert

Article here. Excerpt:

'If you want to get a distilled version of the present moment in American politics, it’s not a bad idea to listen to what poets are saying, believe it or not. Right now, of course, a lot of the arguments are about identity. Elisa Gabbert is a poet and essayist who lives in Colorado and is the author of The French Exit and The Self Unstable. Last week, in an advice column for Electric Literature, she answered a note from a white male poet worried that “the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore.” The column ran under the provocative headline “Should White Men Stop Writing?” and caused a storm on social media. The letter summed up a conversation about writing and gender and race and identity that's been going on for a long time but building momentum again since the poets Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's paper about gender balance in experimental poetry journals and anthologies, "Numbers Trouble," was published in 2007. And then with the annual VIDA counts that break down contributions to literary magazines by gender, and more recently ethnicity. I was on a airplane when the storm over Gabbert’s column hit, but we’d corresponded in the past, so I asked her about it.
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Here's what I see as wrong with the standard-issue line that women and POC should submit more to even out the numbers: A) It's honoring the status-quo, racist, sexist system that got us here in the first place, and asking underrepresented people to conform to that system and play by its rules, rather than dismantle the system. It's just like telling women the reason they get paid less for the same jobs is because they don't ask for raises and promotions, and they're not aggressive enough. I, for one, don't want to work in an environment where everyone is as aggressive as the most aggressive guy in the room, and aggressive behavior isn't rewarded in women the same way it is in men. Also there are many jobs where being aggressive doesn't make you more effective. It's like giving out promotions based on height. B) It wouldn't solve the problem. It wouldn't solve the problem because editors don't read blind, and they make judgments based on the perceived gender and race of the author, whether they're aware of it or not. As to whether it'll "ever happen," I don't expect my advice to single-handedly solve racism or sexism. (Did anyone ask me to?) One person's vegetarianism doesn't solve world hunger or animal cruelty. One person biking to work doesn't solve climate change. You don't do it to solve the problem on your own, you do it so you can feel like an ethical person and go to sleep at night and maybe effect some small change around you.'