This is such a bad headline. The story is mostly about an author posting fraudulent reviews to promote her own work.
They’ve admitted this publicly. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/13/cait-corrain-p...
> “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive,” she tweeted.
> Many of the books given one-star ratings were written by people of colour
That is not 'specifically targeting.' Why do you have to make this about race?
> They posted a 31-page Google document containing screenshots of the activity of a number of accounts, with usernames including “Chantal B” and “Oh Se-Young”, suspected to have been created by Corrain.
> “There’s something extra despicable about using clearly POC [people of colour] names in the fake accounts to upvote every negative review on POC books so the top ones are all 1 star and 2 star. Like what in the yellow face,” Zhao tweeted. Many of the accounts linked on the document Zhao shared have now been deleted.
AIUI, authors in the subgenre are disproportionately non-white. If that's the case, it would be expected for those targeted to be similarly non-white.
None of this is a defense of the offender: she's definitely a big jerk. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to make every freakin' issue about race.
You have a lot more confidence on a bunch of people doing OSS "research" than I do. The quote itself says "suspected". I would go as far as to say that believing this was racially motivated (rather than just a scummy move) based on this "evidence" is weird, but not surprising.
Interesting. I would have guessed that Chantal is a 90% black name, but I was wrong. It is only slightly more common for black women, and there are many whites with the name too. This may be a regional distinction.
- The subgenre this all happened in has a very different makeup than western publishing broadly, and
- The authors targeted were not all 'people of colour'.
I agree she was likely secondarily racially motivated in some way - maybe due to trust in that subgenre, or the view in some area of the internet that 'people of colour' cannot be questioned. Or maybe she's just a racist killing two birds with one stone. She seems a serial liar, so I doubt we'll ever know for sure.