The RWA was founded in 1980 for writers of, you guessed it, romance novels. Romance is a huge part of the book market – some sources say it’s well over half – so this is no small part of any bookseller’s product.
The RWA has some 10,000 members and about one-fifth of those are published. Its bulletin boards have long been one massive catfight due to almost all of its membership being female, but this week it all came crashing down in a seizure of insanity. Most of its board of directors resigned, and authors are refusing to attend its conferences or judge its contests.
Basically, here’s what happened:
In the 1990s, a white female author wrote a romance novel set in China.
Novel rather stereotypically depicts some of the Chinese female characters as “submissive” with “downcast eyes.”
In 2019, a half-Chinese SJW female author finds the old novel, reads some parts of it, and loudly proclaims that it is a “fucking racist mess.”
This causes the author of the novel, still writing, to lose a lucrative contract with her publisher because they’re terrified of publishing a “racist” writer.
RWA tries to sanction the SJW author for what is essentially libel, but a huge portion of the membership explodes at the RWA for what they see as choosing the white racist author over the half-Chinese SJW author.
The organization probably will not survive.The RWA Twitter feed is a hellhole right now of SJWs gleefully proclaiming that they will drive off all the NWLS and Beckies (Nice White Ladies and “becky with the good hair”) from the RWA because they absolutely despise them.
Nearly 40 years of helping new authors, supporting established ones, and being fully supportive of “authors of color” when that was a new thing in Romance is now down the drain. Even better: The RWA was founded by a woman of color. But I don't think any of these people know that, or if they do it somehow doesn't count.
The degree to which these people are utterly consumed by their own virtue signaling and self-absorption is frightening. Nothing can survive this. Nothing. They think they've won a big victory with their little organization. They're trying to do the same thing with the USA.
They create nothing. They produce nothing. All they do is destroy the work of others. It's horrible.
TL;DR: RWA implodes when SJW writers start taking apart works of fiction to point out "racism" in everything they see.
The RWA was founded in 1980 for writers of, you guessed it, romance novels. Romance is a huge part of the book market – some sources say it’s well over half – so this is no small part of any bookseller’s product.
The RWA has some 10,000 members and about one-fifth of those are published. Its bulletin boards have long been one massive catfight due to almost all of its membership being female, but this week it all came crashing down in a seizure of insanity. Most of its board of directors resigned, and authors are refusing to attend its conferences or judge its contests.
Basically, here’s what happened:
In the 1990s, a white female author wrote a romance novel set in China.
Novel rather stereotypically depicts some of the Chinese female characters as “submissive” with “downcast eyes.”
In 2019, a half-Chinese SJW female author finds the old novel, reads some parts of it, and loudly proclaims that it is a “fucking racist mess.”
This causes the author of the novel, still writing, to lose a lucrative contract with her publisher because they’re terrified of publishing a “racist” writer.
RWA tries to sanction the SJW author for what is essentially libel, but a huge portion of the membership explodes at the RWA for what they see as choosing the white racist author over the half-Chinese SJW author.
The organization probably will not survive.The RWA Twitter feed is a hellhole right now of SJWs gleefully proclaiming that they will drive off all the NWLS and Beckies (Nice White Ladies and “becky with the good hair”) from the RWA because they absolutely despise them.
Nearly 40 years of helping new authors, supporting established ones, and being fully supportive of “authors of color” when that was a new thing in Romance is now down the drain. Even better: The RWA was founded by a woman of color. But I don't think any of these people know that, or if they do it somehow doesn't count.
The degree to which these people are utterly consumed by their own virtue signaling and self-absorption is frightening. Nothing can survive this. Nothing. They think they've won a big victory with their little organization. They're trying to do the same thing with the USA.
They create nothing. They produce nothing. All they do is destroy the work of others. It's horrible.
TL;DR: RWA implodes when SJW writers start taking apart *works of fiction* to point out "racism" in everything they see.
Seems like it's better to only write about the race you know rather than trying to be inclusive and include multiple races in romance novels. You'll just get attacked if you try to broaden the race spectrum. RWA does seem like a shit show on Twitter right now. In a search, RWA is harder to find than the "recaps" of what happened on Twitter and yes, it does seem they want rid of all of the white writers. There are a lot of accusations flying around RWA right now but to strip an author of a publishing contract? Ugly world in romance writing. https://twitter.com/romancewriters
Oh, it's always been very messy beneath the surface; just not as awful as it is right now.
But you might be surprised at who is really writing some of those novels. Some of the authors are not of the same race as the characters they create; they just use pen names to get around that little detail. And the stories are very well received even though some heads would surely explode if they knew the truth.
A whole lot of authors are not who readers think they are. They might be a famous author writing a different genre under a pen name; or more than one person writing under the same name; or an old white male writing about young black lesbians.
And everybody's fine with it as long as they don't know the truth.
Heh.