Traditional Tradesman
1 min readDec 28, 2017

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“In effort to decry the NAACP’s statement, you wrote a reactionary overcompensation of an argument.”

The point I keep making that you keep missing is that I wasn’t making “an argument” of any sort, whether reactionary or otherwise. I was writing an absurd send-up. I’m not seriously telling white people to avoid the “ghetto.” I’m saying, okay, NAACP, if you want to issue a ludicrous statement telling black people they need to avoid the whole state of Missouri because Missouri made it harder to file discrimination lawsuits, then I’ll issue an equally ludicrous statement telling white people they need to avoid the ghetto because they’re not welcome there. The idea is that by reading my piece and seeing that it traffics in overbroad generalization and racism, the reader might realize that the NAACP is doing the exact same thing. This is how parody works. And yet your reaction to my piece was to call it, in essence, overbroad racism. And I’m telling you, “Yes, of course, that’s the whole point…except what you’re not getting is that I’m not endorsing that kind of overbroad racism but combating it!”

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Traditional Tradesman
Traditional Tradesman

Written by Traditional Tradesman

I am an attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. I am a writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays & polemics.

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