Romance Writers of America implodes over handling of criticism of racism

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

This -- making future works better -- is the only reasonable fix when a novelist confronts a negative review he or she feels has great merit.

You can say that again. Totally agree.

[hildea]

Originally Posted by cfrizz

But none of this negates the fact that the RWA has a long standing history of exclusion of minority writers in their committees, in books receiving recognition, etc. This is the important fact that is being ignored and should be addressed and rectified.

Yes, and in hindsight I should probably have put more emphasis on that part of the issue in my first post.

As Milan wrote in the Twitter thread that SteveEisenberg quoted from:

Originally Posted by Courtney Milan

I don’t really have answers to any of this. I feel like our narratives of understanding what is happening focus too much on the personal. Too many people are talking about whether a book is a fucking racist mess, and the problem is an industry. A country. A world.

-

Please keep your focus on the industry, and the country, and the world.

I’m doing my best, but I’m a person with feet of clay and I not want to be synonymous with the principles at play here. The principles are bigger and better than me.

I'd like to repeat something that may have gotten lost in the discussion:
The reason that Grimshaw and Davis were scrutinised is that they both work as aquiring editors at Tisdale's publishing company. In other words, they will decide if the book you send them is worth publishing there or not. This is an industry where where books by authors of color, and books with protagonists of color, are more difficult to get published than books where author and protagonists are white. It's changing, but very slowly. So when people are concerned about how racist views these specific people have, it's not just a "racist people exist" but "if these people have racist views, they can harm the careers of a lot of authors of color".

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Absolutely not. The main reason for republishing old books is for them to be available as an ebook to preserve them from going out of print ever again. It is not a lazy way of an author to rake money in again without doing any of the real work of writing. A simple edit will do.

You don't like that it is exactly political correctness and the term doesn't do it justice? Then call it by the real name. It is the equivalent of fake news with the malicious intent of rewriting history to make yourself paint in a saintly and innocent light by today's standards.

Going forward, by that logic, you will edit every historical book in existence to remove all offending material. You will be no better than a holocaust denier. You will freewilly do the book burnings that did happen not too long ago. If they had the technology back then to simply edit an old version of politically offending books with a new and clean ebook version, they would have done so. Everything they didn't burn, but created new, was propaganda.

If we don't stop this political correctness crap, history will repeat itself.

Yes, though I think that the holocaust denier rhetoric might be a bit harsh. Some of the classic comedy skits from the 30's, such as "The dog died" and the Jack Benny skits had some racial stereotypes that blacks likely found offensive, and it someone today did the same thing today, they would be heavily criticized for it. But that doesn't imply that we should purge those skits or go back and electronically change them.

[DuckieTigger]

(Bold mine)

Originally Posted by hildea

I'd like to repeat something that may have gotten lost in the discussion:
The reason that Grimshaw and Davis were scrutinised is that they both work as aquiring editors at Tisdale's publishing company. In other words, they will decide if the book you send them is worth publishing there or not. This is an industry [..] where books by authors of color, and books with protagonists of color, are more difficult to get published than books where author and protagonists are white. It's changing, but very slowly. So when people are concerned about how racist views these specific people have, it's not just a "racist people exist" but "if these people have racist views, they can harm the careers of a lot of authors of color".

Gatekeeping is a publisher's job, not a RWA problem. The RWA has very little financial risks involved, while a publisher has to carefully consider the books to be published. So from that standpoint, in a white dominant market, I would imagine, that the financial risk is lower for a white book than a different book.

Now the big question is how to give a publisher more incentive to be more diverse, if they don't want to embrace it on their own. The RWA could force the issue by no longer considering any books by too narrow minded publishers for the RITA. Sounds a little too heavy handed, though. Now that they postponed 2019 until they can award 2019 and 2020 together, they will have the perfect chance to establish a new image of the RWA. It kind of worked with the Nobel when they had their own issues.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Yes, though I think that the holocaust denier rhetoric might be a bit harsh.

Yes, you are probably correct about the harsh rhetoric. I specifically chose it, because it is the one thing that came to mind that is impossible to argue against (the holocaust definitely did happen) and has the polar opposite effect of promoting a positive view against racism.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by DNSB

In this case person C was not a random person unconnected with the company. Ms. Milan was the chair of the RWA ethics committee at that time and as such could be considered in a position of authority. Most companies would frown on executives going outside the company as a step in complaining about a employee never mind making it the first step.

Have you seen any evidence that Ms. Milan attempted to communicate with Ms. Davis about her concerns prior to the "fucking racist mess" tweet that kicked off this kerfluffle?

I have not even gone to look. Honestly, I was trying to boil this down to a problem that removed the hot-button political issue so it could be discussed outside the partisan vitriol. I was simply trying to show how an organization that makes a thing and represents the people who make those things was handling an ugly internal/external dispute.

Though I will say, it is perhaps possible that Person C was concerned about retaliation, reprimand or felt that internal channels would be useless and therefore went the public route. I'm not defending the decision or saying it was the smart way to go about it, but there could have been reasons. It is also possible that there is an internal policy not to discuss those internal complaints publicly. Maybe Person C is not permitted to say whether they attempted an internal report or not. We are not likely to ever know.

Though I will admit that conflating product improvements with claims of racism was worth a laugh.

I wasn't trying to conflate nor was I doing it for a laugh. In law school, widgets are used by professors as an example of a completely undefined thing. It doesn't have to be a product that is manufactured. It could be a creative work, it could be a service. I perhaps should have been more clear about that at the outset. However, books - still products, so it isn't that far of a stretch anyway. And I did not say improvements - I said that some thought the widgets "bad" and some just "outdated," which is the same language many in this thread have used.

[hildea]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Gatekeeping is a publisher's job, not a RWA problem.

You did notice that it was the publisher who involved the RWA, right? Nobody complained to RWA about these potentially gatekeeping editors. Some authors complained in public to the publishing house about them employing potentially racist gatekeeping editors. Then the publishing house lodged a formal complaint to RWA because someone was saying mean things about them on Twitter. And then the president-elect of RWA, Damon Suede, did some acrobatics with the rules for handling such complaints, and tried to boot Milan out of RWA.

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

The main reason for republishing old books is for them to be available as an ebook to preserve them from going out of print ever again. It is not a lazy way of an author to rake money in again without doing any of the real work of writing.

In this case, I'm pretty sure Davis did re-release her book to earn money. Not sure about "raking in", most authors don't earn a lot of money, and I don't begrudge them extra income from new releases of older books.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

This -- making future works better -- is the only reasonable fix when a novelist confronts a negative review he or she feels has great merit.
...
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.

With ebooks it's much cheaper to issue a new edition, so I expect we'll se more of re-releases with small edits. If there's something in a book that may hurt its sales, and isn't too hard to fix, it makes sense for the author to change it. Davis certainly seems to think so:

Originally Posted by Davis in "White romance novelist in racism row says she was used"

Meanwhile, Davis said she had decided to make some changes to the novel Milan had criticized, Somewhere Lies the Moon, and that she has republished edited ebook versions.“Some people have contacted me and have told me calmly what it was that offended them, and it was very few things, and I have corrected those things,” she said.

[hildea]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Absolutely not. The main reason for republishing old books is for them to be available as an ebook to preserve them from going out of print ever again. It is not a lazy way of an author to rake money in again without doing any of the real work of writing. A simple edit will do.

You don't like that it is exactly political correctness and the term doesn't do it justice? Then call it by the real name. It is the equivalent of fake news with the malicious intent of rewriting history to make yourself paint in a saintly and innocent light by today's standards.

Hm, rereading this, it seems that you are criticising Davis (quite harshly, at that) for issuing a new edition of her book, after changing those few things that readers she spoke with found offensive?

I think that's unfair. If she tried to pretend that this was the only edition, and remove all knowledge of the first version, it would be dishonest (and probably impossible). But openly making a new edition in this case is, in my opinon, completely OK.

I've read one book which was the author's first novel, and in the first version the end was a bit clumsy and hurried. She published a new version some time later, where the ending was rewritten -- nothing substantial had changed in the plot or the events, but the writing and pacing was better. Do you see that, too, as "the equivalent of fake news"?

Going forward, by that logic, you will edit every historical book in existence to remove all offending material. You will be no better than a holocaust denier. You will freewilly do the book burnings that did happen not too long ago. If they had the technology back then to simply edit an old version of politically offending books with a new and clean ebook version, they would have done so. Everything they didn't burn, but created new, was propaganda.

If we don't stop this political correctness crap, history will repeat itself.

Here, you seem to be tilting at windmills. Who has advocated rewriting any historical book to remove all offending material? Noone in this thread, as far as I can see. (Sure, it has happened a few times, I mentioned some examples in the Politics and Religion thread about this), but it's pretty rare, and mostly seem to be done when small changes are assumed to improve the publisher's profits, like the retitling of Christie's "Ten Little N-".)

[hildea]

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.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by cfrizz

THANK YOU!!!!! For pointing out the obvious, I was going to do so in a far less tactful matter, but I don't want to get the thread closed.

I would suggest that those that don't care about this issue, or want to label it falsely as political correctness, find another thread. All you are doing is mucking up this one!

With all due respect, stating that it's being labeled "falsely" as political correctness is begging the question. That's part of what we are discussing here--the "how" of how this occurred and the why.

Hitch

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

As a thought experiment:

Let's say that this is about the classic law school widget. Person A and Person B have made widgets in the past. The models they made might now be old, outdated and replaced with other, better widgets.

Person C makes statements about those old widgets. Among her concerns are that Person A, who made that original not-so-good and/or outdated widget is now in charge of overseeing the production of widgets end emplying those who make widgets. Person C is concerned about this and says so.

Person C gets in trouble. They have said something that WidgetCo is not comfortable with. Could be any number of reasons - could be that WidgetCo don't want to damage the sales of the current widgets. Simple reason. Could also be that they don't want someone they have put in a management position discredited as someone who makes bad widgets.

So the WidgetCo Administration tosses out their own rule book for how to handle employee complaints, bars Person C from ever being in a management role at WidgetCo and suspends Person C from WidgetCo activities. All outside of their standard way for handling employee issues.

For purposes of this experiment:

1. What the widget is doesn't matter.
2. What made the old widgets outdated and less good that the new ones is irrelevant.
3. What WidgetCo is as an organization doesn't matter.
4. First Amendment free speech still exists.

In my initial post, I mentioned that I would not want to work for anyone who treated their employees this way. I stand by that statement.

Feel free to ignore, but when looked at this way (especially the opinions about the widgets themselves), this issue for me was an employee/employer dispute that was handled in the worse way possible.

Thank you for the widget argument. I concur that I would not wish to work for or be overseen by RWA, given their behavior in this matter. I still have major issues with the genesis, mind you (and person C's, for that matter, behavior)--but vis: RWA, your analysis is spot on. Freedom of Speech only matters if it's allowed for everyone, not just people with whom we agree.

Hitch

[Quoth]

Correctly, the complaint of the Publisher to the RWA about the person criticising them (who was criticised for having racist employees) should have been ignored. no matter if the criticism was unjustified to totally justified. It's not part of the RWA reason for existing to police writers on behalf of a publisher. Nor can a writers' association sensibly police publishers other than issues of payment. So the RWA has showed themselves to be incompetent.
The Publisher was idiotic in their approach to the criticism.
Even assuming the actions or attitudes of the two employees of the Publisher are/were racist as the original author (it was an author?) claimed, that person approached it wrong.
So everyone looks bad, ESPECIALLY the RWA, and it seems they shouldn't even have been involved according to their rules.

Maybe the best thing is for Romance Writers in America to found a new organisation with an unrelated name.

Would anyone even have heard of the stupid publisher without this row? I mean today there is Harlequin/Mills&Boon (who probably rarely take new writers, as is the case with big 5 and other popular genres) and then Self Publishing.

I think Romance, woman drama*, Detective and Adventure/thriller are the most popular selling and hardest for a new writer to get published by big 5

No-one can give "diversity ratings" or approve Publishers either as many outside the big 5 are very niche markets, so may not seem diverse. Like someone that only publishes LGBTQI, or Hindi, or Moslem, or Celtic & Norse fantasy, or books only in Scots Gaelic, or Swahili.

(* I hate the term Chicklit)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

Correctly, the complaint of the Publisher to the RWA about the person criticising them (who was criticised for having racist employees) should have been ignored. Even if the criticism was unjustified. It's not part of the RWA reason for existing to police writers on behalf of a publisher. So the RWA has showed themselves to be incompetent.
The Publisher was idiotic in their approach to the criticism.
Even assuming the actions or attitudes of the two employees of the Publisher are/were racist as the original author (it was an author?) claimed, that person approached it wrong.
So everyone looks bad, ESPECIALLY the RWA, and it seems they shouldn't even have been involved according to their rules.

Maybe the best thing is for Romance Writers in America to found a new organisation with an unrelated name.

Would anyone even have heard of the stupid publisher without this row? I mean today there is Harlequin/Mills&Boon (who probably rarely take new writers, as is the case with big 5 and popular genres) and then Self Publishing.

No-one can give "diversity ratings" or approve Publishers either as many outside the big 5 are very niche markets, so may not seem diverse. Like someone that only publishes LGBTQI, or Hindi, or Moslem, or Celtic & Norse fantasy, or books only in Scots Gaelic, or Swahili.

If we use AStrangerHere's thought argument, about widgets, we have to ask ourselves a fairly simple question:

If Milan had ranted about Davis simply being a crappy writer--would ANY of this have happened? AStrangerHere's thought experiment says that Person C says that the widgets suck--but, that's not exactly what happened.

If the complaint had been that Davis' work was simply awful, would RWA have become involved at all? Would anyone have paid any attention?

You can't extract the racism angle, the PC angle, from what's happened. You simply can't, because who thinks that any of this would have occurred without it? Just saying that someone has lousy books wouldn't have triggered all of this, so I don't see how they are extricable, not in any good-faith way to get to the heart of it. There wasn't some firestorm about crappy writing and nobody here can say with a straight face that there would have been. I mean, we ARE talking RWA and I'll bet that at least every author there, as in any writers' organization, has at least one sh***y book to their name.

Hitch

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by hildea

You did notice that it was the publisher who involved the RWA, right? Nobody complained to RWA about these potentially gatekeeping editors. Some authors complained in public to the publishing house about them employing potentially racist gatekeeping editors. Then the publishing house lodged a formal complaint to RWA because someone was saying mean things about them on Twitter. And then the president-elect of RWA, Damon Suede, did some acrobatics with the rules for handling such complaints, and tried to boot Milan out of RWA.

Acrobatics? Try to remember that Ms. Milan is not only an author but also was the chair of the RWA ethics committee when she triggered this whole tempest in a teapot.

[SteveEisenberg]

Davis said she had decided to make some changes to the novel Milan had criticized, Somewhere Lies the Moon, and that she has republished edited ebook versions.“Some people have contacted me and have told me calmly what it was that offended them, and it was very few things, and I have corrected those things,” she said.

I am surprised.

Here's a precedent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aw...nce#Repainting