This past week, I read Why Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice (amazon.com/Why-Indigenous…) & came upon this excerpt where the author demonstrates of prejudice, bias and intolerance to his students by having them read a pulp romance novel in public. 
Couldn’t screenshot all pages, but this line afterwards stuck with me:
“...what happens when an entire community is pathologized as having a lower degree of cultural achievement and is thus excluded from consideration of having any...merit at all?”
“...what happens when an entire community is pathologized as having a lower degree of cultural achievement and is thus excluded from consideration of having any...merit at all?”
And that, friends, is how prejudice, racism and bigotry work. People think they have to be actively involved in these things for them to be bigots, not knowing that simply participating in the system--even while sympathetic & esp while knowledgeable about its harm--is enough.
That’s all I can think of wrt the ongoing #AmericanDirt discourse. Every single person choosing to continue to participate in propagating misrepresentative pieces of literature like such is participating in systems like these, and whether they like it or not, they are complicit.
And another important part is, as @justinaireland says: it is not done out of ignorance. #AmericanDirt isn't a clueless error; it is intentional. Folks know how complicity works: it generates outrage, and in tandem, publicity. And that's that on that.
