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    Everything you need to know about the RWA’s ongoing racism controversy.

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    August 9, 2021, 10:16am

    After intense and sustained criticism, Romance Writers of America, the largest organization of writers in the country, has chosen to rescind their highest award—the Vivian—which was recently given to a book accused of glamorizing genocide.

    Some useful context: the RWA has been grappling with accusations of racism for a few years now. (If you know about this, feel free to skip the next five paragraphs.) Before the Vivian was established, the RWA’s flagship award was the RITA. In March 2018, the RWA came under fire for snubbing Alyssa Cole’s extremely popular interracial civil war romance An Extraordinary Union in favor of a finalist list all by white women, all but one set in 19th-century Britain, featuring white women falling in love with aristocrats; the RWA released a response acknowledging that the number of RITA finalists by Black authors was less than .05% of the total number, and that no Black romance author had ever won a RITA. (In 2019, Kennedy Ryan and M. Malone became the first Black authors to win RITAs.)

    Then, in August 2019, trouble struck again when the RWA decided to punish one of their members for calling out racist writing. Popular author Courtney Milan, at the time serving as the chair of RWA’s ethics committee, participated in a social media conversation about two editors from Glenfinnan publishing house, both of whom were also RWA members. The conversation noted Sue Grimshaw had liked Tweets questioning whether white supremacy was real, and segregated Black authors’ romance books as the romance buyer at Borders. From there, Milan criticized other Glenfinnan editor Kathryn Lynn Davis for upholding racist stereotypes about Asian women in Davis’s book Somewhere Lies The Moon, including descriptions of Chinese people as having yellow faces and slanted eyes and Chinese women as being submissive and compliant. Author Suzan Tisdale (another RWA member) defended Grimshaw on Twitter (her account is now deleted), prompting a Twitter thread from Milan condemning her behavior.

    Here’s where the RWA comes in: after these Twitter exchanges, Tisdale and Davis filed complaints against Milan through the RWA. After Tisdale’s complaint, then-RWA President HelenKay Dimon asked Milan to resign as chair of the Ethics Committee; after Davis’s complaint, which claimed Milan hurt Davis’s earning potential and violated the RWA’s social media potential, the RWA board voted to suspend Milan’s membership for a year and ban her from holding any RWA leadership positions.

    In late December of 2019, Milan’s friend (and author) Alyssa Cole explained Milan’s censure in a viral Twitter thread. Learning this news, many authors spoke out in favor of Milan and aired stories of racism from local RWA chapters, including paying Black speakers half the usual speaker fee. (Chuck Tingle also weighed in.)

    A recall petition was filed to remove RWA President Damon Suede, who had replaced the previous president Carolyn Jewel after her resignation and was involved in the sanctions against Milan; the 2020 RITAs were canceled; and finally, the RWA ended the RITAs and replaced them with a new award, the Vivian, named after RWA founder and Black romance publisher Vivian L. Stephens.

    So everything was solved, right? Wrong. Flash forward to July 31st of this year, when the inaugural Vivians were awarded. The RWA awarded the Vivian for Romance with Religious and Spiritual Elements to Karen Witemeyer’s At Love’s Command—which opens with a romanticized depiction of the Wounded Knee Massacre. The male love interest, who is a 7th Cavalry officer because he “found his parents and baby sister murdered by a Comanche war party,” cites Scripture as he commands the Lakota Sioux to put down their weapons; then a “medicine man chanting” starts causing havoc and the massacre begins. The love interest asks God’s forgiveness and gets a happy, romantic ending.

    The irony of lauding this book in Vivian L. Stephens’s name, especially after the RWA’s promises of more diversity, incensed RWA members—many of whom canceled their memberships, contacted the RWA, removed their books as Vivian finalists and winners, and took to Twitter to express their displeasure:

    Writers noted the difference between free speech and awarding offensive content; the Christian-favoring nature of the award category; and the continually disappointing racial dynamics of the RWA.

    On August 2, RWA released a statement where they rescinded the Vivian awarded to At Love’s Command. In the statement, RWA noted that the 2021 inaugural Vivian finalists were the most diverse class in the history of RWA and said they received no complaints about the book from any of the Vivian judges. Said RWA, “RWA is in full support of First Amendment rights; however, as an organization that continually strives to improve our support of marginalized authors, we cannot in good conscience uphold the decision of the judges in voting to celebrate a book that depicts the inhumane treatment of indigenous people and romanticizes real world tragedies that still affect people to this day.”

    So far, the responses have not been glowing.

    https://twitter.com/RomancingNope/status/1422315692985131020

    Controversy racism Romance Writers of America romance writing RWA scandal The Hub VIVIAN Awards
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