Maya Angelou: The State Poet of the Monoculture - "Her incipient and uppity poetry became enshrined in our country’s lexicon and she became America’s unofficial state poet in the 1990s." (It is difficult to judge black literature because it is either marinated in stoic noble suffering or righteous anger that gives the White reader a choice of being either Birmingham’s Bull Connor or Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’)

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THE STATE POET OF MONOCULTURE

By Michael McGregor

Maya Angelou is dead and we are told to care.

If you have been through the American education
system in the last 30 years, you have been taught
that Angelou was our country’s greatest modern 
poet and a symbol of our new identity as a multi-
racial state.

Yes, she was black and discussed race a little too
much for the bourgeois Whites who want us all to
just be colorblind (unless it comes to picking a 
neighborhood to live in). But she was amiable 
enough to be accepted by the mainstream of 
society – both right and left – and was almost like 
Martin Luther King reborn as a female poet, 
except the right only accepts her rather than 
(hilariously) trying to adopt her as one of their own.

Her incipient and uppity poetry became enshrined 
in our country’s lexicon and she became America’s 
unofficial state poet in the 1990s. Her words filled 
up American textbooks with their inanity and comfy 
messages of being yourself -- while still feeling 
guilty that yourself happens to be White.

Like King, she relied on White guilt to become 
enshrined in our country’s new cultural pantheon 
and believed in the falsehood that America could 
one day become a functioning multi-racial state.  . . .

http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2014/5/29/the-state-poet-of-monoculture


It is difficult to judge black literature because 
it is either marinated in stoic noble suffering 
or righteous anger that gives the White 
reader a choice of being either Birmingham’s 
Bull Connor or Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch 
in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ If you are a 
‘liberal,’ as I once was, the choice is easy. 
But if you start seeing the scam behind the 
Martin Luther King narrative, reality starts 
peeking out like a cleansing sunrise after 
a dark nightmare. After all, now that 
Birmingham is run by Africans, it has 
become a violent corrupt bankrupt third-
world city that a thousand phony poets 
and a million phony poet worshipers 
cannot prop up or wish away. Hmm, where 
did all that black nobility go?