[Full disclosure: I was a member of RWA from 2004 thru 2012. I've lost track of how many contests I judged in RWA, and frankly, it's not an easy job. I left because of how they treated erotic romance, gay romance, and ebooks. Their educational programs are fabulous, but the inbred weirdness of the Board and the management got to be too much for me. I also have several writer friends who are still members, and that's their choice.]
After the controversial handling of what amounted to a publisher's complaint against a POC member, the entire Board disintegrated. Board members quit in disgust. The president was forced to resign, as was the executive director. Then there was the dust-up over the old Rita Awards when a story about a Nazi officer who hooked up with a Jewish chick and she converted to Christianity won a fucking Rita.
A lot of folks quit RWA after those hot messes. Judges withdrew from participating in any RWA awards. Hell, even several chapters left the parent organization over the bullshit.
So the new Board, the most diverse Board I've ever seen, eliminated the Rita awards, going as far as cancelling them outright in 2020 (which was probably a good thing in regards to the raging COVID-19 pandemic though the cancellation happened before the U.S. shut down).
The new Board tried to address the marginalization of non-white, non-straight, non-Christian authors. They renamed their awards to reflect the Black founder of RWA, Vivian Stephens, and overhauled the rules for both entries and judging.
Apparently, they didn't go far enough.
I marginally paid attention to the Vivians on Saturday. I was in the middle of trying to finish writing a novel, and only because a friend was up for the romantic elements category. (She didn't win, and thank Cthulu, she wasn't in the Christian romance category!)
*facepalm*
I'm going to start by pointing out a similar FICTIONAL situation. Back in the early '80's, Chris Claremont was the writer of the Uncanny X-men, a Marvel title. (You may have heard of it.)
He had one of the heroes, Jean Grey, aka Dark Phoenix, eat a sun, and as a result, she killed an entire planetful of people. Billions of lives were lost.
During a story planning session with then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, Chris outlined his redemption arc for Jean. Jim said, no, Jean needs to die. The men went back and forth until Jim laid down the law. Marvel heroes DO NOT commit genocide!
To me, this is a much bigger deal than DC claiming Batman does not eat pussy.
Other Marvel writers have since retconned the Phoenix Saga so it wasn't the real Jean Grey who committed genocide. But the original storyline has stuck with me. My heroes CANNOT do something so heinous and irredeemable and remain a hero.
Real life is bad enough. Real life sucks. Romance readers want their happy ending. I get that. But not at the cost of 300 real people who died in one of the most atrocious government acts in U.S. history. And especially, not when the bodies of dead Native children from what was a re-education facility were returned so recently.
RWA has issued a statement regarding the Vivian awards.
Every time I think things are becoming more equitable, reality slams a frying pan into my head. I should be working on my novel, but I needed to get my disgust out of system.
And to my friends who say RWA has changed, it hasn't, and it makes me queasy.
Wowwwwww.... :(
ReplyDeleteOkay. :/ I've never had anything to do with the RWA, much less the RITAs specifically (for exactly the reasons you listed above) but I judged the EPPIEs for a while, so I'm going to extrapolate a bit.
My guess is that Vivian judges are allowed input on which categories they judge. Usually this is to protect the pearl-clutchers from anything Naughty (Heavens forfend a good church-going lady have her eyes sullied by a sweet gay romance where two men or two women actually kiss!! much less a sexy one; and to be less sarcastic, someone who's not into serious kink has no basis from which to judge a BDSM romance) but I've known folks who'll opt out of the inspirationals too, if they're not that brand of hardcore Christian. Depending on the community feeling, I can imagine a situation where all the judges in the inspirational category were the kind of people who are the target market for inspirationals. Maybe not even just people who read them, but possibly the actual target market, if you get the difference.
And I can imagine that kind of person being so wrapped up in the literal Christian-Belief-Salvation-Yay-God aspect of the story, that they believe there's literally nothing their deity can't redeem if a Christian sincerely repents and submits himself to the mercy of blah-blah-blah, so to them, this probably came across as an awesome redemption story. :/
So I can imagine that no one in that chunk of the judging pool realized that the other 99.9% of the (non-white-supremacist) human population would be horrified by this book.
I'm not giving them a pass. I'm just trying to figure out how this could've happened, because I'm a writer and speculating about motive and process is what I do. :P These folks all need a good whack upside the head. And IMO at the very least, the RWA needs to make sure that at least one non-Christian reads every inspirational being judged, if this is the sort of thing those readers think is wonderful.
Good grief. :(
Angie
Funny enough, these are the same people who don't know the difference between a cross and a ankh.
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