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Like Slate's Jack Shafer, I'm curious to see whether Maureen Dowd uses her next Times column to address the mini-plagiarism scandal surrounding her last one (Dowd admitted to unintentionally lifting a paragraph
from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall, blaming the confusion
on a conversation with a friend who quoted the passage to her without
attribution.) But I can't agree with Shafer that Dowd's explanation
sounds "plausible—if a tad incomplete." Her account of how Marshall's observation found its way into her column is patently absurd. Unless the friends in question are... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Guess I’m a rube, too, Hanna. When David started the e-mail thread at Slate calling BS on Seltzer’s “memoir,” I had the sneaking suspicion that folks were quick to denounce the book’s veracity out of the notion that a white girl couldn’t possibly be raised in a black foster family or have experienced the stuff that Margaret Seltzer said she had. No doubt David and others saw fakery in aspects of the story aside from her skin color. I, too, thought she was playing up the lingo and lifestyle for effect—the gangster recuperating from a gunshot wound on her couch was a bit much, and the pit-bull tattoo, well. Still, that didn’t prove that the writer hadn’t spent her adolescence in South Central running drugs for thugs. Assuming that a white girl wouldn’t be placed in an inner-city neighborhood with a black foster family is folly. My black aunt took in plenty of white kids, from toddlers to teens, during many years as a foster mother. There's a thorny presumptuousness behind the mind-set of how could a white kid possibly get stuck in such a hopeless life! In reality, a white girl could be placed in a housing project in Compton or a trailer park in Riverside. She could wind up slinging crack or meth. Both scenarios are feasible, even if they don’t apply to Margaret, and hopelessness knows no skin color.
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Here is an entry in the category of why my husband is better than your husband. Since the minute he read the review of Love and Consequences, the book by a white girl (Margaret Jones) raised in South Central by a black foster mother, "Big Mom," David has insisted it must be made up. I meanwhile insisted that he was just being cynical, world-weary, crass. I have lately been spending lots of time in poor, run-down apartment complexes and was affected by the idea of a gang-banger who could live to write about it. So much so that a couple of days ago I bought the book. You know where this is headed. I was literally just settling in tonight to crack open the book when I hear David running triumphantly up the stairs. Indeed, he was right. The New York Times reports that the entire thing is made up. Every bit of it. Apparently her sister called the publisher when she read about the book and saw a photo of the author, whose real name is Margaret Seltzer. The chick grew up in the San Fernando Valley, with her own family. She went to a private Episcopal school. In the Times story, she still seems, queerly, to defend herself, insisting she was giving a voice to the voiceless. The voiceless? Has she not seen American Gangster, or listened to any rap music? "Maybe, it was an ego thing," she tells the Times. Yeah, maybe.
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