Bruce Bawer on Amiri Baraka

Whatever else the recently kicked it writer was--Jew-loather, Black supremacist, all round cranky dude--he was a really crappy poet, as Bruce Bawer reminds us here:

Some of Baraka’s poetry (to quote my book again) “reads like a parody by Howard Stern or a young Eddie Murphy of mindless black radical hate: ‘Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.’” Nor is this sort of language just confined to his poems. In one 1965 essay, he wrote that “[m]ost American white men are trained to be fags,” that black men should want to rape white women as a way of taking from white men everything they have, and that white women know that only when they’re raped by black men will they “get cleanly, viciously popped.” Somehow he forgot to insult Jews in that one; but he more than made up for the omission in a number of other places...

 He was the Edgar Guest of the Black Panther set.