Some of the people below are trying to make a case for his innocence because the woman he raped has kept silent about it. Well, 1, it was almost certainly part of her settlement that she could NOT talk about it and 2. after watching how reporters and journalists are attacked just for asking a question about it, what…

Well written, smart, fair piece. Hope you don’t get roasted for it.

Is it his wife’s job to educate him though? I mean, yes, we should let our loved ones know when they’ve fucked up, but he’s a grown man with an education and internet access. He can learn if he wants to. Other people as well have been trying to help him understand both this choice and his homophobic comments are…

To clarify: Suggested stories are from The Root at large. VSB, being part of The Root, automatically populates recommended stories that aren’t only exclusive to VSB, but part of the parent platform (as all of the above are). This is the first time VSB has written about this issue.

I stopped and stared at the screen for a long minute after reading your comment.

I may be screaming into the void here but I need to let this out.

Gianna, one of his daughters, was in the bird too, if the commenters here would like to stop dancing on his grave for a minute.

My thoughts too - what does matching a picture have to do with biology and why is a teacher giving high school freshmen a preschool level task.

Aside from the inappropriate question, it’s not exactly challenging to determine that Suspect 1 is the rapist.

Correct answer: When the responding officer arrived at the scene, he took one look at Suzy and decided that based on her appearance she must have been asking for it. Based on this assumption, he never offered to collect a rape kit. He gathered no physical evidence, made one attempt to get a copy of the video from the…

Why isn’t the criticism valid? The problem isn’t one of a person writing about a culture of which they are not a part; the problem is writing about a culture of which they are not a part and reinforcing racist and sexist tropes (around the magical blue-eyed POC and subservient Asian women, romanticizing the West,…

WOW, you are your own follower - kind of self-indulgent.

Eh, it mattered enough for you to write back. Either way, if you actually read Milan tweets,

As soon as you have to say something along the lines of that it wasn’t racist in year xxxx, you need to stop, you lost the argument.

If you read the passages from the book that Milan cites, the passages are objectively racist — and, at a minimum, stereotypical. Claims of immersing oneself into a culture does not protect/prevent you from writing something racist. Racism does not need to be intentional to be racist.

a person who was born and raised of another race can just claim to “immerse” themselves into another race/culture for “six years”  and all of a sudden be free from criticism from people who were actually raised within that culture/race??

I was skeptical of this too, but read the author actually had an advanced degree in Chinese culture and language and had lived in China for 6 years. Which makes it even more strange that her defense was something bizarre like “immersed herself in Chinese culture.” Give your legitimate credentials.

None of this surprises me. My wife and are friends with a couple of RWA members, and were friends with another. As writers ourselves (non-romance) we’ve been to a handful of RWA events with our RWA friends and there is an odd sort of toxic pleasantness that the writers seem to exhibit towards one another. The way they…

I didn’t have a lot of time so I only scanned this story.