So, look: about this whole RWA mess. I'm not a member of the organisation, but I am a writer who cares a ton about diversity and romance, so I'd like to give my perspective on being a white lady (or afab genderqueer person, in my case) who has done Dumb Racist Stuff.
Whenever racism comes up as an issue in cases like this, there's always people - and, let's be honest, self-professed Nice White Ladies number significantly among them - who think that intent matters more than impact. If they don't MEAN to be racist or FEEL racist, they can't be!
Here's the thing: while there is, indeed, a distinction to be made between someone who is openly, purposefully hateful and someone who is hateful via accident or ignorance, that distinction can very quickly become meaningless if:
a) the accidental bigot reacts with hostility or by placing more importance on their own distress than their victim's when called out; b) if they don't apologise or even try to understand the problem; and/or c) if they remain repeat offenders despite being told the problem.
To give an example, running someone over maliciously is technically different to running them over as a drunk/careless driver, but if you do a hit and run, then claim you barely hit them, yell that they damaged your car and are a bad person anyway and don't fix your driving? Yeah
Here's the thing about being a white lady: even if you're marginalised along other axes, you can still have a lot of privilege. In an (often unconscious) effort to mitigate the bigotry you face, it is very very easy to bond with those who *share* your privileges by being bigoted.
It's possible to do this even while caring about the subjects of your bigotry, in no small part because we're raised in a racist society and, especially when we're younger, we don't always recognise the dog whistles for what they are; we just know using them helps us fit in.
At other times, we think bigotry towards more marginalised groups is okay because - again, often as an effort to fit in with the people oppressing us - we've learned to make sexist jokes about ourselves (or about "other girls"), not recognising them as a form of self-hatred.
We tell sexist jokes with our white dude friends and laugh because *they're* laughing, which must mean we're one of the Cool Girls and therefore not the subject of the joke; we're in a separate category of woman to whom social sexism doesn't apply, b/c we can "take a joke".
So we say to the more marginalised: see, WE can laugh at ourselves, so why can't you? Except, of course, that we're telling ourselves the joke isn't actually at OUR expense; it only applies to Uncool Girls, whereas the joke we want others to excuse is one WE just made about THEM.
And then there's the problem of benevolent stereotypes, where we feel that the declarative thing we're saying about another group is positive and so therefore MUST be acceptable, even if it comes from a place of total fucking ignorance and cultural misapprehension.
For example: "But why is it racist to tell a Chinese person she must be good at maths? That's a compliment!" It's racist because you're making assumptions based entirely race, which is exactly as offensive as if a random man assumed you loved shoe shopping because you're female.
Even if you DO like shoe shopping, having some random man grin at you and expect you to praise him for his Awesome Powers of Deduction because that was his opening line on seeing that you were a lady, it's still insulting, because it's not ABOUT you at all. It's a stereotype.
And when you stereotype someone, it's inherently othering, because what you're doing is saying, "I don't need to get to know you, because I can already guess what you are, and if you disagree with my guesses you're just being difficult." It's deindividuating and - yes - racist.
Here's the thing: part of the difficulty of being raised to be a Nice White Lady in a sexist, patriarchal setting is that, over and over again, you're told that womanhood makes you a bastion of natural goodness, and that being Bad in any way is fundamentally unwomaning.
Particularly for Nice White Straight Christian Ladies who were raised to be such, there's this immense cultural pressure to always be seen to be *trying* to be Nice and Good, because intent *matters* in that context, especially if you're going heavy on the Christian influence.
The worst thing you can accuse a woman of in this context is of *deliberately* being Bad, because that's tantamount to her not caring about her womanhood, which is culturally The Biggest Insult. This also means you use passive-aggression and inference so as not to be Bad yourself
In this moral-cultural context, therefore, being told that intention matters less than impact? It's not intuitive. It literally doesn't parse, because if TRYING to be nice doesn't matter, then what's the point of anything? Never mind that ignoring impact leads to toxicity.
All of which is a way of saying: I understand *why* so many Nice White Ladies get het up and defensive and cry crocodile tears about how they've been WOUNDED TO THE CORE when told that a thing they said or did was racist. But understanding something doesn't excuse it.
Accept that you're going to screw up sometimes, despite your best intentions. Accept that it won't always feel good to be told you've screwed up, but that, if the screw-up hurt someone, your feeling bad about it doesn't outweigh their hurt and shouldn't be their problem.
Here's the thing: nobody else can do your thinking for you. You can ask for people to provide links and triple-source their arguments about Why The Thing Was Racist 'till you're blue in the face, but if you're not prepared to actually THINK about the material, it's pointless.
I know the vast majority of us went through secondary education systems that tended to prize rote learning over critical thought, but the world isn't school, and sooner or later, you need to know how to admit fault without a graded paper in front of you.
If you're a Nice White Lady who has conniptions when told that a thing you said or did was racist because Niceness is a core part of your identity, consider that a *genuinely* nice person would care about having hurt someone else. Someone who only *performs* niceness would not.
Even if you can't see how what you did or said was hurtful in the moment, recognise that the other person is indeed hurt apologise for it, then SIT DOWN AND THINK ABOUT IT PROPERLY. And unless you truly don't care about hurting people/niceness? Don't do the thing again anyway.
FIN
