&quot;He sort of implies that minorities are published because we&#x27;re minorities, not because of our work.  That&#x27;s just insulting.&quot;<p>What Prof. Chang means by this is that she believes minorities are published because of the quality of their work, and anyone who suggests that they&#x27;re published simply because they&#x27;re minorities is wrong and motivated by a belief that minorities&#x27; work does not stand on its own merits, which would indeed be insulting.<p>If this white guy announced, &quot;I&#x27;m going to use a Chinese-sounding pen name because I think it&#x27;ll make my poems more likely to be published,&quot; then yeah, I think a case could be made that it&#x27;s insulting, because he would be <i>presuming</i> that minorities&#x27; work does not stand on its own merits.<p>But in this case, the white guy did not make a racist statement.  What he did was demonstrate that in at least one case, the Chinese-sounding name <i>did</i> influence whether his poems were published.<p>So, if it&#x27;s insulting, it&#x27;s insulting not because of what this man said or did.  Rather, it&#x27;s insulting on the part of the publications, who <i>did</i> judge the poems on something other than their merits.