Sorry for spamming the thread with multiple posts
but the discussion is going in a lot of different directions, and I think it's less confusing if I adress different points in different posts.
For those who want to know more about the backstory, you might find this blog post from 2016 interesting:
Speaking up against systemic racism in the publishing industry.
Some interesting points:
- An individual in the publishing business has written an article which, to others, reveal a problem of racism in the business -- in this case, that a big review site reviews very few books by non-white authors.
- Comments about how this is a problem leads to a discussion about racism on social media.
- This discussion about racism is labeled as “mean-spirited” and “unprofessional” by some others.
I see similarities to what's going on currently. It's an example of structural racism -- the people involved most likely don't conciously think "We will discriminate against authors of color", but their business practice does lead to such discrimination. When this is pointed out, the people involved get defensive, and some others are more angry at the ones pointing out the racism than at the people perpetuating the racist structures.
Oh, an the author of that blog post is Courtney Milan. If you look at her blog, you see that she writes quite a lot about publishing, and is outspoken on behalf of both herself and other authors in several cases, not just regarding racism, but also trademark trolls, publishers who don't pay their authors, and plagiarists. She's very visible, and might have looked like a good target for someone who wanted to make an example of someone who isn't "nice", but there are lots of people who work against racism in publishing.