John Derbyshire Remembers Maya Angelou As ‘Talentless’ ‘Whining’ ‘Affirmative Action Mediocrity’

Former National Review contributor John Derbyshire, for one, is not mourning the death of former poet laureate Maya Angelou. In a post on the White Nationalist cite VDARE today, Derbyshire responds to Angelou’s death and to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations” – which he admits he didn’t actually read – with characteristically longwinded, racist drivel.

Derbyshire sets up his post by declaring that “I always assume that any black person in a well-paid position is an Affirmative Action hire” and goes on to declare that Coates, Angelou, and for good measure Attorney General Eric Holder, are all “talentless” “Affirmative Action mediocrit[ies].”

Derbyshire, of course, hasn’t deigned to read anything that Angelou wrote except for the poem she read at the 1993 Clinton inauguration, which he calls “semi-literate gibberish” and “formless, meaningless babble” that reminded him of “the whining of pampered pets.”

And then, Maya Angelou. I first heard that name in 1993, when she read one of her “poems” at the Clinton inauguration.

It was a quite sensationally bad poem. I remember being shocked by how bad it was. With the whole world watching, this is how the U.S.A. presents itself to the world? With this semi-literate gibberish?

It goes without saying that none of the formal devices of English verse, developed and refined across centuries, were employed by Ms. Angelou. She probably thought them unacceptably white. Her contribution to the 1993 Inauguration was formless, meaningless babble.

I have never read her autobiographical bestseller I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. From what I can find out about it on the Internet it seems to be another exercise in white-hating sex-obsessed black solipsism … but possibly the references I found were all biased.

In short, another Affirmative Action mediocrity.

For fifty years now we’ve been giving breaks to blacks, and not just Affirmative Action sinecures like those enjoyed by Ta-Nehisi Coates and the late, but equally talentless, Ms. Angelou.

We have pretty much dismantled our civilization in an effort to accommodate blacks. And still they complain.

The Ta-Nehisi Coateses, Eric Holders, and Maya Angelous seem, in their impenetrable narcissism, to hear their own voices as the groans of an oppressed race from under the iron heel of White Supremacy.

Those voices sound to me more like the whining of pampered pets.