[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by cfrizz

One of their members who is a minority, who just happened to be on one of their many committees pointed out some ethnic stereo typing in an old book, which happened to be reissued in 2014 that she as a minority found offensive on social media.

"Pointing out" is a strange way to describe a tweet reading, in full, as follows:

And we’ve been talking about Sue Grimshaw?

Someone sent me a link to a book written by the other editor, Kathryn Lynn Davis, and is a fucking racist mess.

{n subsequent posts, Milan admitted "I didn’t finish the sample" and acknowledged her own writing wasn't the best:

I think a lot about my flaws as a person. I’m not the most tactful person. I do measure my language, but unfortunately, my measure goes up to 11. I have a temper. It shows.

Originally Posted by cfrizz

The decent thing for the other author to do would have been to say Ok I'll take another look at it and see what I can do.

I find this unreasonable.

Milan didn't write some superb negative review. She instead insulted a sample of a book after not even reading the whole sample (something it is to Milan's credit that she admitted).

The tweet used a hot-button insult word -- racism. And the insult came from an ethics committee member of the trade organization of Davis's own trade. This isn't what will result in a normal person becoming open to new ideas. What your post terms "the decent thing," given the circumstances, would defy human nature.

But what if Davis is so abnormal as to learn from being insulted by someone from the ethics committee? What could she then do?

This is not best-selling non-fiction where, just possibly, you can correct what you did in a second edition. When Charles Dickens was tactfully criticized, for his portrayal of Jews in Oliver Twist, by a friendly critic who read the whole book, Dickens's response was to change his portrayal of Jews in later books. This -- making future works better -- is the only reasonable fix when a novelist confronts a negative review he or she feels has great merit.

I don't expect Davis to go Dickensonian here because of what happens when you become a hate object on the internet (now the fate of both Davis and Milan), and also because Davis may not have actually created anything approaching a Chinese equivalent of Fagin. But if Davis did write a book that was unfair to the Chinese, and regrets it, we wouldn't yet know she hadn't done "the decent thing" because of the time required to write and publish better books.