local yakult enthusiast

the simple version that people reacted to was that Amanda Gorman, the young black poet who read at the US inauguration of Biden, was going to be translated into dutch by a white prose writer.

everyone went (rightfully, at that level of description) completely ballistic, because how could a white translator, and worse a prose writer, ever understand the themes that Gorman was putting out there. The translator pulled out of the project, which is still being reassigned.

but here's the thing that was lost in all of this:

Gorman chose the translator herself.

said translator was Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, who is a highly acclaimed author in their own right: they literally won the Booker International in 2019. They're also non-binary, and the number of people that misgendered Rijneveld as articles, posts and tweets rushed in to the pile on against them was honestly awful.

People got so caught up in their simple black-and-white version of racial politics that they never even stopped to ask why Rijneveld had been chosen in the first place, and so missed that it was Amanda Gorman who wanted them. In essence, thousands of people, many of them white, decided they knew more about the themes a black woman was writing about than the woman herself.

Gorman had her reasons to pick Rijneveld. Who were we to tell her she was wrong in her choice of who could accurately capture her own words?