When authors grossly misbehave online and put marginalized people at risk, @erikhane and I always talk about what we would do if we were their agents. How do we help repair the harm done, and leave publishing better than how we found it?
In most cases, a very clear, correct move is to drop the author, but it's not for the reason you might think. It's not an agent's role to punish an author for bad behavior, and we're not their bosses. We drop someone to reject our complicity in racist power structures.
Agents are an author's conduit to traditional publishing. We provide, most crucially, access. Access to money, to media attention. Additionally, we work with the author to optimize that access.
An agent dropping a racist, violent author isn't punishment; it's deplatforming. It's a moral and necessary stand to fight against how the structures of publishing protect those who make money, regardless of the harm they cause.
It's acknowledging your role in providing that access, that platform that allowed the harm to occue, and then rejecting it.
It's easy to brush off problematic events or statements as an agent--they're not your words, after all. Except that you built the plinth for those words to stand on.
Which is why deplatforming and removing an author's access is also not enough--there's a need, a personal need, for agents to make reparations because *they also did harm*
Is the agent doing a thorough review of their list, and preventing harm? Is the agent committed to continuing education for themselves and their authors? Can they commit monetarily to changing the publishing landscape, to make it safer?
Can they materially or ideologically use their role to raise the platform of the people who were hurt?
And finally, will the agent listen to the people who were harmed and meet them where they need to be met, rather than deciding on their own how to make everything fine again (which usually just means waiting it out and doing nothing)
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