Publisher apologises for minstrel-like performance of a Black woman’s essay

A PUBLISHER’S neglect to listen to the final audio recording of a Black scholar’s essay kindled accusations of minstrelsy and ended in an apology for what ‘basically amounted to auditory blackface.’

“Da Art of Speculatin’,” written by Regina Bradley and published in Fireside Magazine, is about how acclaimed hip-hop duo Outkast blended Black Southern life of the past and present in their music to paint possibilities of their lives in the future.

The first line identifies the writer as a ‘southern Black woman who stands in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement.’ The essay appeared Nov 24 in Fireside, with the audio version published alongside it.

Despite the topic and its author, the person who narrated the audio recording was a young, White male voice actor who spoke in an accent that listeners interpreted as something that would appear in a minstrel show.

Bradley shared a clip on Twitter of the narration of her work after hearing it for the first time earlier this week. She asked Fireside and the voice actor in the tweet if it’s what they thought what Black women sound like.

Bradley, an assistant professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, said in an emailed statement to The Washington Post that she questioned the choice of narrator.

“Why is this man doing terrible Jamaican patois?” she said.

“And then he started my actual essay, and I felt anger and betrayal. Is this how illegible southern black women are to white folks, especially white men,” she said, expressing her disbelief that the vocal artist could have been comfortable with his performance.

She immediately conatcted the Black editor who worked on the story with her, who was equally disappointed by the choice of narrator, she said. Bradley said she was unaware that Fireside recorded readings, and didn’t know what her piece was being read by someone else for publication.

Bradley and many of her Twitter followers questioned how someone could have approved something she considered so hurtful, especially during a year filled with conversations about racial injustice, Black absence from many spaces and how the publishing world could do better to include voices and narratives from people of color.

Publisher and art director for Fireside Magazine, Pablo Defendini, said there was nothing insidious in his decision, saying he simply didn’t listen to the recording before posting it. He apologized, calling the result something that “basically amounted to auditory blackface, in the worst tradition of racist minstrelsy.”

“The blame for this rests squarely with me, as the person who hires out and manages the audio production process at Fireside,” Defendini said in a statement published on the company’s website. “In the interest of remaining a lean operation, I’ve been hiring one narrator to record the audio for a whole issue’s worth of Fireside Quarterly, and I don’t normally break out specific stories or essays for narrating by particular individuals.”

Even though the current issue featured multiple works from people of color and was edited by a Black man, Defendini said he didn’t consider Bradley’s individual essay when he hired Kevin Rineer, the man who read the essay with no direction.

Defendini did not respond to a request for comment. Rineer told The Post in a statement he was unaware he would be reading a Black woman’s work when he auditioned for Fireside Quarterly, and that he received the full manuscript for the work only after signing a contract.