Thanks, Simon. I tend to avoid the cultural appropriation debates because my view is: Everybody should be allowed to write about anything. And those debates can get really tedious.

I took on this one because the argument involved a level of lunacy I hadn't seen previously that may represent a trend: Potter was somehow supposed to own up to a very indirect influence, if any, on those tiny books, or in some other way (an apology on the Edwardian equivalent of social media?).

In addition, as I mentioned in another comment, it sometimes seems that British critics like that that author see anti-black racism as "worse" than anti-Native American racism or maybe just don't understand how awful the treatment of Native Americans was. I have no data to back that up--just my impressions--but it's very odd.