For years, romance publishing has been roiled by an increasingly fierce debate over the ways an industry largely controlled by white women has treated authors of color. Now, the romance industry’s largest trade group is facing backlash for trying to formally discipline a best-selling author for calling another author’s book a “fucking racist mess”.

The controversy started last week, when the Romance Writers of America, a trade association representing nearly 10,000 writers, announced it would discipline author Courtney Milan for publicly criticizing passages in Kathryn Lynn Davis’ Somewhere Lies the Moon for including harmful stereotypes about Chinese women.

RWA’s board of directors determined that Milan had “engaged in conduct injurious” to the organization, and that she would be suspended from the group for a year, and barred for life from holding a leadership position.

Milan is widely acknowledged as one of the most prominent advocates for diversity and inclusion within romance publishing, and is known for her frequent Twitter threads about racism and her behind-the-scenes work as a former member of RWA’s board of directors. She was instrumental in helping RWA’s leadership recognize how the group had excluded and marginalized authors of color, particularly black authors, and in pushing the organization to change, RWA’s former executive director told The Guardian last year.

The news of Milan’s punishment sparked an uproar among romance authors and raised questions about whether some of RWA’s white members were attempting to silence or push out the group’s anti-racist activists.

The still-unfolding controversy prompted at least ten members of RWA’s board of directors, including the president, to resign. The board members who resigned included black, Asian and Latinx authors, who had previously made up what had been hailed as the most racially diverse board of directors in the group’s history.

Many prominent romance authors, including past presidents of the Romance Writers of America, also spoke out in support of Milan, using the hashtag #IStandWithCourtney.

“For the last six years we have tried to make RWA more open and inclusive and it breaks my heart that it has come to this,” tweeted another past president of the organization, Dee Davis.

Amid the backlash, RWA announced on Christmas Eve that it had “rescinded” its vote to discipline Milan, “pending a legal opinion”. In a statement emailed to members on Monday, RWA’s board and staff said they were hiring an outside law firm to conduct an audit of recent events, and that the ethics complaint against Milan had been closed and she remained a member.

But for many romance writers, the damage was already done. Some RWA members are calling on the group’s remaining leadership and some staff members to resign, as well. Others organized a petition to recall the group’s new president, Damon Suede. Waves of authors announced they were stepping down from other roles in the group, or quitting the organization altogether.

RWA itself acknowledged in a public statement last week that the organization was “at a turning point” and that “we have lost the trust of our membership and the romance community”. But the group’s current leadership also struck a note of defiance in its statement Monday, reprimanding members and “organizational leadership – past and present” for “inappropriately” sharing private information during the controversy, and saying that the group “is not alone in trying to balance free speech with civil discourse”.

Milan told the Guardian she had been shocked by the board’s decision, particularly since she had recently received a service award from the association for what she saw as the same kind of advocacy the board of directors suddenly decided to censure.

Milan said she said she wanted full transparency about what had happened and who was responsible, before she could say what the best path forward for romance authors might be.

“I don’t think I have the full story, and this may be a story that has a small number of bad actors,” she said.

One reason the attempt to discipline her had sparked such wide outrage, Milan said, is because RWA had previously failed to take action to discipline members after complaints about their racist and homophobic comments on social media.

The choice not to discipline anyone for “actually racist speech” made punishing someone for “calling something racist” seem like a particularly troubling double standard, Milan said.

“People saw it as an attempt to silence marginalized people,” Milan said. “Doing this to me seemed like a message that if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone, and everyone needed to shut up.”

Tempest in a Tweetstorm

Milan, a New York Times best-selling author of Regency and contemporary romances, is no stranger to Twitter controversy. For years, in long, vividly written threads, she has dissected the way racism works in romance publishing, frequently naming names.

The discrimination authors of color have faced in the publishing industry is not subtle. Many romance novels continue to include troubling racial tropes and stereotypes, when they feature any nonwhite characters at all. Some booksellers still segregate romance novels by race, with stories about black characters shelved in separate, “African American” sections. Agents and editors have repeatedly questioned whether anyone wants to buy love stories about heroines of color. Before 2019, no black author has ever won a RITA, the Academy Award of romance novels.

Recent efforts to address racism within Romancelandia, and level the playing field for authors of color and other marginalized writers, have attracted backlash, with some white authors questioning whether racial disparities are actually proof of racism, whether RWA has become obsessed with “political correctness,” or whether “diversity for the sake of diversity is discrimination”.

HelenKay Dimon, a past RWA president, previously told The Guardian that she regularly received letters from white RWA members expressing concern that “now nobody wants books by white Christian women”.

There is “a group of people who are white and who are privileged, who have always had 90% of everything available, and now all of a sudden, they have 80%. Instead of saying: ‘Ooh, look, I have 80%,’ they say: ‘Oh, I lost 10! Who do I blame for losing 10?’” Dimon said.

The tweets that sparked the ethics complaints against Milan, which were posted this August, were part of a broader conversation on romance Twitter about how individual racist beliefs held by gatekeepers within the publishing world have shaped the opportunities available to authors of color.

Milan posted screenshots from Somewhere Lies the Moon, a romance novel originally published in 1999, and explained why she thought it was a “fucking racist mess”. She noted that she had not read the entire book. One passage in the novel, Milan wrote in her original thread, suggested that no one had noticed the half-Chinese heroine’s blue eyes because “they never saw her eyes in China because she was always looking down”.

“What is this. How did Chinese women not bump into things. How did Chinese women read. Where did she get an education if she couldn’t like, look at anything,” Milan wrote.

In another passage, Milan wrote, characters were described as having “slanted almond eyes” and faces that were “almost yellow.”

“As a half-Chinese person,” she wrote, “seriously fuck this.”

In response to Milan’s tweets, Davis, the book’s author, and Suzan Tisdale, another author who founded an independent romance publishing house where Davis works as an editor, filed formal ethics complaints with the Romance Writers of America, alleging that Milan was “a bully” and that her allegations of racism had hurt their careers.

Davis defended her novel as “historically accurate” and alleged that Milan’s “cyber-bullying” had led to her “losing a three-book contract with a publisher whom I cannot name because they fear having their own name linked to Ms Milan’s”.

Had Milan read more of the novel, she would have discovered “themes and plot points that establish precisely the opposite of what she claims”, Davis wrote.

The fact that Milan was then serving as the chair of RWA’s ethics committee was “akin to putting a neo-Nazi in charge of a UN human rights committee”, Tisdale wrote in her complaint, alleging that Milan had “continually and repeatedly” launched “disgusting attacks” against other authors and RWA members.

“She is accusing me of being a racist simply because I am white,” Tisdale wrote.

In her official response to the ethics complaints, Milan wrote that her criticisms of the novel were accurate, and that they had been shaped by her own personal experience.

“Negative stereotypes of Chinese women have impacted my life, the life of my mother, my sisters, and my friends,” she wrote.

“I will not apologize, and am not sorry for, trying to make people recognize that negative racial stereotypes are harmful.”

Tisdale, the author of more than 20 romance novels, told the Guardian on Friday she had been furious to have a friends’s book labeled as racist by someone who admitted to not having read the entire thing. She said that it was especially unfair to launch this kind of criticism against a book that had been published decades ago.

At the same time, Tisdale said, she had been shocked by the severity of the punishment RWA initially imposed on Milan.

“I think it was a little harsh, I really, truly do,” Tisdale said. “The ban for a year was too much. All we wanted was an apology.”

Although she did not agree with the RWA’s original response to her complaint, Tisdale said, she also disagreed with the board’s choice to “rescind” its punishment of Milan after widespread criticism on social media.

“I feel like it was giving the wrong message,” she said. “You’re rescinding a decision, not based on new evidence or something you didn’t know about before, you were caving to the climate that is Twitter.”

She herself had left RWA after it rescinded its decision, Tisdale said. She said she had also been asked to leave her local chapter of Romance Writers of America, and had done so.

“My emails, my text, my phone, everything has just exploded,” Tisdale said. “And they all said the same thing: ‘We support you, we don’t agree with what’s happening, but I can’t say anything publicly.’”

As for RWA itself, Tisdale said, she agreed with other authors that the organization had reached a serious crossroads.

“I think it’s imploding,” she said. “I think it was inevitable, considering the current political climate.”

• This article was corrected on 31 December to state that black authors were awarded a RITA for the first time in 2019.