Do we like Junot Díaz?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A decent public record on migrants and race, set against alleged misconduct that was never tested in court and a muddled response.
Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. His family expected a smart immigrant kid to become a doctor or an engineer, so telling his mum he'd be a writer was a hard conversation. He has said the family stayed disappointed, and that literary prizes mean little in immigrant households.
The trouble started in May 2018 at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Writer Zinzi Clemmons used a Q&A to confront him, and alleged that he cornered and kissed her against her will when she was a 26-year-old grad student. Carmen Maria Machado and Monica Byrne said on social media that he had treated them inappropriately and aggressively. Díaz pulled out of his remaining festival appearances.
His response was patchy. First came a statement through his agent saying he took responsibility for his past and that men need teaching about consent and boundaries. A few weeks later he told the Boston Globe he was shocked, and denied the Clemmons claim flat out. Three Boston Review editors resigned in protest when the magazine kept him on as fiction editor. An apology followed by a flat denial is hard to read either way.
The institutions didn't act against him. MIT looked into it and said it had found nothing that would lead it to restrict him as a professor. He had stepped down as chair of the Pulitzer board, and that board's independent legal review later found no evidence warranting his removal, so he was reinstated. No court has ruled on any of it, and the accusers' claims remain allegations he denies.
On the harm check, his public record leans the right way. He told a university audience that the occupation of Palestine is wrong and that criticising it is taboo in the US, which is a view plenty of people share and plenty reject. He also took on his own birth country over its treatment of Haitian migrants. Nothing anti-LGBTQ or anti-planet turned up, but I also found nothing from him on trans rights, so that's a gap.
The good stuff is real. In 2015 he joined Edwidge Danticat on Capitol Hill to urge Congress to condemn the Dominican Republic's treatment of Haitian immigrants. The Dominican consul called him anti-Dominican and said he had revoked a national honour, which is a cost paid for speaking up for someone else. He also told the Dominican government there was a state of terror, which is a strong line.