Sigh, I asked everyone to behave while I was gone, and alas, a repeat racist offender did not. To provide the historical context here is a link to my post on the RWA meltdown and promise of change from January of 2020.
RWA's Board resigned, the awards were deactivated and renamed, and there were promises of EDI training and a commitment to doing better going forward.
Fast forward to the final days of my vacation and....well, RWA is at it again.
Please see this article from Book Riot entitled, "Romance Writers of America Wards Book With a Genocidal "Hero." Please read this article and then come back here.
Look RWA cannot stop these racist books from being written. And this title is not even close to the only one. There are A LOT of books where a Nazi becomes the hero too. However, what RWA should be doing, as the awarding organization, is catching these titles in the awards process and NOT allowing them to advance. They received training and are supposed to be more sensitive to EDI considerations, but clearly they are not.
And I am even more upset because I know EXACTLY how these processes work. I have been a Head Juror for a Bram Stoker Award category for the last 5 years. It is the job of every juror in our Stoker Awards process to make sure racist or problematic titles are held off the ballot. And we have two people who oversee all of the juries and can also step in before things even get to the first round of member voting. I purposely asked my jury to NOT consider a title one year, a title that got a lot of buzz, a title that I think the author was surprised was not nominated, and it was precisely because I was concerned it glamorized sexual grooming of an underage youth and I found it highly misogynistic. I did not forbid the title to be moved forward [which I could have], but I did share my views with our jury and it was agreed that we would not move it forward to the next round.
So I know what I am talking about. I don't care what their excuses are, they were supposed to be checks, balances, and training to stop this from happening again. Clearly it did not work. But more upsettingly, clearly people ddid not care.
Do better RWA.
And for you, the library worker, please stay abreast of these issues. Think about NOT ordering Romance titles that make a perpetrator of genocide a "hero." If a patron request it, please know you are within your means to tell them you will not buy it. But if you are bound by rules that say you have to buy well reviewed titles that local patrons request, buy it but then don't put it on the new shelf and then weed it as quickly as possible. I talk about this strategy at length in my half of the anti-racist training I do with Robin. Contact me if you need [free] help with this particular issue.
Everyone though, be aware and hold RWA and the entire Romance genre to a bare minimum decency standard.
OMG! A romance novel featuring a soldier at Wounded Knee!? Having grown up in South Dakota, doing some undergrad papers on the American Indian Movement and other activists, I am appalled. No, this book will not be added to the public library collection I manage. It is time that history is corrected even (if not more so) in fiction.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad someone is finally shining a spotlight on this. Racism has been seeping into libraries for quite some time via this sort of thing! There are actually some other groups besides RWA that need to be called out for racism. Good job, Becky! Miss you.
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