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Reviews are good, readers can read reviews and make their own desicions on whether they want to read books.
So how do some of you get from that to applauding the people who try to silence those reviews? Why do you support the thin skinned opponents of criticism and free speech, the ones who use underhanded methods to try to remove people with unpleasant views from their trade organization?
I mean, I get that the criticism of the publishing house may be more complicated (I support Milan there as well, but I haven't taken the time to go into that aspect of the situation yet). But the part of the conflict which is about Davis and the reviews of her book should be easy, a no-brainer.
I wish the people who fight against racism were as powerful as some of you seem to think they are. If you were right -- if credible accusations of racism actually were career killers -- the world would look very different.
It's possible that Davis has hurt her career, but if so, it's because of her immature handling of criticism, not because of racism in an old book. After all, the author who published that anti-semitic romance between a nazi concentration camp commander (!) and a jewish concentration camp prisoner (!!) still has a career. (That romance was on the shortlist for two awards from the RWA, by the way. And this was as recent as 2015.)
Imagine if Davis' response had been something like:
"Huh, that book is twenty years old, we just republished it. I'll ask the publisher to pay for an editor to help me go through it with fresh eyes."
and then either:
"Ok, there are some parts I'm not satisfied with, we'll republish an updated version. Thanks for letting me know about the problems."
or:
"After looking at it, I'm satisfied with how it is." and then taking the resulting bad reviews like a grown up author, without filing ethics complaints as if a bad review of a book is a personal attack.
I'm pretty sure that any possible damage to her career (which she admitted in a recent interview was nowhere near as clearcut as she pretended in the ethics complaint) would have been negligible if she'd chosen that kind of approach.
Writing a racist book isn't a career killer. Having racism in a book pointed out isn't a career killer. Reacting extremely badly to criticism may hurt your career.
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