A Book-World Implosion
Critic vs. Critics Why over half of the board of the National Book Critics Circle just quit.
a few weeks ago, as protesters rallied around the world against systemic racism and police brutality, 12 board members of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization of some 800 critics that gives out a number of annual awards, began to draft a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Noting that the publishing industry has long been overwhelmingly white from top to bottom, they wrote of their “culpability in this system of erasure” of Black and indigenous voices from the cultural conversation and outlined a series of steps their organization could take to support critics of color. Just 30 percent of last year’s winners and finalists were writers of color. “We can and must do better,” they wrote.
“It was really exciting,” Ismail Muhammad, a Black writer and critic who helped craft the statement, told me. “We were hoping to change ourselves and then model something for the entire industry.” Those hopes faded as quickly as they materialized. Just as the group was about to share the statement with the world, the organization began to fracture and then implode, joining a number of cultural institutions across America that have erupted into conflict in recent weeks over issues of race, power, and structural inequality. More than half of the National Book Critics Circle’s 24-member board, which had included six people of color, has resigned in a flurry of recriminations. Some who remain are uncertain how the organization will continue to exist at all.
The fissures in the NBCC first appeared less than two weeks ago, after the organization’s president, Laurie Hertzel, who is white, ran the statement by several board members who hadn’t participated in writing it. She asked them to weigh in on an email thread with the entire board. One board member, Carlin Romano, said he disagreed with some of the claims in the letter but didn’t want to “distract the great majority of the Board from its mission.” Nevertheless, he went on to detail his objections to a number of those claims, dismissing the statement’s fundamental premise as “absolute nonsense.” A white critic and former board president, he took issue with the idea that the publishing business operated with “the full benefits of white supremacy and institutional racism” and that “white gatekeeping had been working to stifle black voices at every level of our industry,” as the statement contended. These assertions, he argued, amounted to “calumnies on multiple generations of white publishers and editors” who had fought to publish authors of color. “I resent the idea that whites in the book publishing and literary world are an oppositional force that needs to be assigned to reeducation camps,” he wrote.
In her reply, Hertzel reassured Romano that she’d always appreciated his perspective. It “shines unlike anyone else’s,” she wrote. “Your objections are all valid, of course.”
When Hope Wabuke, a UgandanAmerican author who had suggested writing the statement in the first place, read this exchange between Romano and Hertzel, she was outraged. Later that morning, she posted screenshots of the group’s emails on Twitter and, in an accompanying thread, announced her resignation from the board. As a longstanding board member, she wrote, Romano had a powerful say in determining who received the organization’s annual prizes and which books were reviewed, and she criticized Hertzel for failing to call him out. Describing a deepseated culture of racism and antiBlackness at the organization, she added, “it is not possible to change these organizations from within, and the backlash will be too dangerous for me to remain.” (Wabuke did not respond to a request for comment.)
A wave of resignations followed, which in turn unleashed a second wave and a third. Some left in protest of Wabuke’s decision to air the board’s business on Twitter and because they felt she hadn’t accurately represented the organization, while others stepped down because they felt that those members were more concerned about confidentiality than racism. Members of a third group resigned because they had lost faith in the NBCC’s ability to find its way out of the mess. As one board member put it, the sequence of events was “bizarre and bloody in an endofaTarantinomovie way.” As of this writing, only ten of the 24 board members remain. Only three Black critics sat on the board to begin with, and all have stepped down.
Among the members who resigned in protest of Wabuke’s Twitter thread was the president, Hertzel, who announced her decision hours after the emails were made public. “As a board, we need to be able to deliberate in confidence and with trust,” she told me. “I did not see any way forward to serve on a board where confidentiality had been breached.” Still, she regretted how she handled Romano’s email. The board had been set to vote unanimously in favor of the statement, she said; by flattering Romano, she had hoped to keep him from “derailing the discussion and torpedoing the vote.”
“Carlin and I have a bad history,” she explained. “He spent many days torpedoing my reputation in a series of board emails back when I was running for president. Since then, I have tried to treat him with kid gloves so it could not be said that I was retaliating for his personal attacks on me.”
Romano, who once made headlines for writing a review in which he imagined raping the author of the book, has intermittently sat on the board since the mid’90s. According to nearly a dozen current and former members, he has developed a reputation in the organization as a bully. Romano declined to speak on the phone for an interview, but he sent along a statement. “A few Board members in recent years have sought to turn the Board, for decades committed to fairminded judging of books from every
“It became clear that Carlin cannot be made to leave the board— he is shameless. At this point, he is sitting on a throne of skulls.”
political stripe, into a ‘No Free Thought’ zone, an ideologically biased tool for their own politics,” he wrote. “In my opinion, they oppose true critical discussion. Good riddance to any of them who resign—the NBCC will be healthier without them. I’ll attempt to stay on the Board, despite concerted opposition, in the hope that I can help NBCC return to its earlier, better self.”
As the board continued to disintegrate, some members hoped they could salvage the situation by removing Romano. But according to the bylaws, the entire membership must vote to remove a board member. When he learned of discussions to depose him, Romano fired off a series of emails threatening to sue each member of the board “in personam,” which, as he pointed out, “means that no one can easily cover your individual legal fees.” “I have lots of energy for this, and it will cost me nothing,” he wrote.
“It became clear that Carlin cannot be made to leave the board—he is shameless,” Muhammad said of the back and forth. “At this point, he is sitting on a throne of skulls.”
Each of the Black board members who stepped down did so for a different reason. Muhammad decided to leave after Hertzel put out a statement denouncing Wabuke’s decision to leak the emails without criticizingRomano. John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, stressed he did not support Wabuke. He left, he said, because he felt like he no longer fit into the culture of the board. “There’s an idea we’re supposed to subscribe to these days. That to disagree with a Black person’s views about something having to do with race is racist,” he told me. “I don’t subscribe to that.”
Nearly a week after the resignations began, the remaining ten board members gathered on Zoom to discuss what might be done to salvage their organization. With the threat of Romano’s lawsuits enforcing a tense civility, they decided to enact all the plans outlined in the group’s original statement in support of Black Lives Matter and to review the bylaws, the committees, and the fundamental structure of the organization. One former board member pointed out that action is meaningless while Romano remains on the board. Still, those who gathered were focused on how the organization could be saved. “I haven’t resigned because I’m hopeful the system can be rewired and reimagined,” said Richard Z. Santos, a critic, novelist, and highschool teacher living in Austin, who is one of two people of color who remain on the board.“That may be naïve, and I’m sure the process will be frustrating. And if it can’t be saved, I’ll also be happy to leave.” ■