Too often, the debate is framed in maximally uncharitable terms that add more heat than light. Alexie tried his best while treading in a sensitive area, in which defining justice is hard. That doesn’t place him beyond criticism. But he shouldn’t be vilified or personally attacked. Stepping back, it ought to be obvious that if he’s hit upon the ideal method to judge what is effectively a big poetry contest, that doesn’t make him a good person; and if he’s chosen a wrongheaded method, that doesn’t make him a bad person.

At the very worst, he did the wrong thing. Who among us hasn’t?

Alexie started from the position that race should be one of many factors considered to remedy historic injustices and to increase racial diversity in publishing. Some of his critics insist that poems should be selected on merit alone. Their critics counter that white poets have unfair advantages in a colorblind system––or that beyond a certain threshold it’s impossible to say which poem is better. In many ways, this maps onto the long-running debate about affirmative action in college admissions, except that applying to colleges that practice affirmative action with a Chinese American identity would more likely harm than help an applicant. (I wonder whether diversity efforts in the poetry world will always benefit Asian Americans, or whether they will eventually follow college-admissions trends. As best I can tell, none of the poetry folks discussing this has any specific numbers on the actual representation of Chinese Americans or Asian Americans in poetry.)

This story caught my eye in part because I’ve been writing a lot about “colorblindness” and its critics. Last week, I argued that while the “colorblind” philosophy that a lot of millennials were raised with has serious shortcomings––flaws that the academic left did a service by pointing out––the backlash against race-neutral solutions to injustice and colorblindness as an aspiration has gone too far. It may be clarifying to apply the approach I hoped to suggest to a specific controversy.

At The Rumpus, Brian Spears writes that “many in these conversations have asked about blind submissions, as though these allow the editor to put their focus on the work and not on the author bios. Blind submissions are a fig leaf, an exercise in deniability used by people who don’t want to do the hard work of having a diverse journal.”

I’d put it differently.

If forced to select all works for a Best of 2016 poetry anthology (and magically vested with the qualifications to do so) I’d want to judge the poems without bylines. But I wouldn’t imagine––as proponents of colorblindness are historically prone to do––that blind submissions alone are sufficient to bringing about a just selection process or to broaden the talent pool. They’re not sufficient: Today, race is one of many factors that matter. So I’d seek submissions from people of all economic classes, regions of America, and ages; and with regard to race and ethnicity in particular, I’d solicit recommendations from as racially diverse a group of poetry lovers as I could find; aggressively seek submissions from underrepresented groups; tout the inclusiveness of the process to communities that might doubt it; and select lovers of diverse styles to help me narrow submissions.