After a looooong couple of weeks, Damon Suede and Carol Ritter stepped down today as President of the Board and Executive Director of RWA, respectively.
https://www.rwa.org/Online/News/2020/Announcement_from_the_RWA_Board_of_Directors.aspx
The question in the mind of many members is, will the organization survive this?
Should it?
I think it should, but only under strict proviso that the commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion must be backed up with action. Including, but not limited to: the resignation of the entire board, particularly those Damon Suede hand picked; a membership-wide vote for a new board within a month; evaluation of the entire executive staff (including people working newly created positions that may not fall under "staff") with an eye toward termination of anyone with a controlling hand in both the handling of Courtney Milan's ethics matter, and the *not* handling of other ethics complaints; new guidelines and active moderation of RWA forums to ensure posts which cause harm to members or groups of members are not allowed. This would be the bare minimum to begin with.
RWA has a lot of clout in the publishing industry, clout that benefits a broad swath of authors--not just romance, and not just RWA members (see: Cockygate, among others). They are one of the few organizations that can actually get Amazon to act on complaints. That clout cannot be easily replicated, and it's worth trying to retain. If--big huge IF--RWA can stop picking and choosing its fights based on whim rather than established criteria. And if the organization can be brought into 2020, clear out the bigots, and become the advocacy organization our founders always meant it to be, it's worth saving.
[*]The first recall petition was rejected on procedural grounds but a second was successfully delivered with in the allotted time frame and was under review when Suede resigned.
The petition was certified today, bearing more signatures than were needed. It's not a stretch to suspect that this was a big factor in today's resignations.
So, yeah. My holiday season was completely destroyed by all of this and I'm surprised I haven't dropped dead from further health issues aggravated by the stress and worry.
It really did put a huge, extra stress on the holidays.
Hopefully we can see some real progress on righting some of the wrongs. Sure like to see RWA step in on the Dreamspinner mess, but I suspect it's too late for many authors, and RWA's credibility is weakened at the moment. On the other hand, Dreamspinner appears to have actively falsified information so Suede could run for president under the rules set forth by RWA bylaws, so there may still be some leverage to bring to bear.