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20
Let's try this whole "having a conversation about a difficult topic" thing again.
2010 at 7am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Most days, I am proud to be a member of the book blogging community.
This Monday was not one of those days.
I spent most of the weekend with my head in a book and off the internet, so I missed most of the now-controversial discussion about publishers whitewashing book covers. If you were as unplugged as I was, the in-a-nutshell recap goes like this: several major publishers have misrepresented the race of main characters on the covers of their books, particularly books directed at the young adult (YA) audience, by putting white and light-skinned girls on the covers of books whose main characters are people of color. This is hardly a new phenomenon in publishing, but it is certainly a problematic one, and it’s about time we had a conversation about it. (If you’re looking for more background info than that, read this article from Salon.)
On Monday, a book blogger who has a large following and is well-respected in the YA blogging community wrote a post exploring the concepts of racism, white privilege, and the problems with whitewashing in publishing. Her post may not have been perfect, but it was a call to dialogue. It was a beginning.
Or, at least, it could have been. It should have been.
I don’t know this blogger very well. In fact, I don’t really know her at all. But I could see what she was trying to do, and I respected it. She was taking a risk by writing a post about very sensitive, personal, emotionally-charged issues, and she was using her platform and her wide reach to try to make a statement of standards and expectations that had the potential to reach publishers.
It had the potential to make a difference.
Unfortunately, several people missed the point and threw away their opportunity to make constructive comments, choosing instead to hurl insults at each other and the blogger, and what I read in those comments made me embarrassed for them and ashamed to be associated with them. I am not linking to the post because, really, those comments do not deserve any additional attention, and what I want to do is re-focus the blogging community on what this conversation was supposed to be about in the first place.
Because I am not involved in the YA community and don’t have emotional ties to anyone involved, I have the benefit of a little distance and detachment, and that, in case you’re wondering, is why I’m blogging about this at all. I do not presume to speak for all of us; rather, I hope to spark conversation that will lead to insight and better understanding and change.
The post I’m referring to was supposed to be a coming together of bloggers and readers—of people who buy books and promote books and support the publishing industry—and the beginning of a movement in which we tell publishers that we will not accept whitewashing any longer.
So people, let’s get it right this time.
A message to publishers:
We, the reading community, want to see diversity in the characters we read about, and we want to see those characters depicted accurately on book covers. And we have a few things to say:
White readers do not just want to read books with white characters and white people on the cover.
People of color do not just want to read books with white characters and white people on the cover, and your assumption that they do is insulting, degrading, and a sorry capitulation to the wrongheaded belief that people of color must secretly want to be white.
This matters because so much of how we make sense of the world and our own experiences comes from what we encounter in media (books, music, television, movies, etc.), so it is important for media to offer accessible, easy-to-relate-to role models in whom people of every race, color, creed, and sexual orientation can see themselves and begin to shape their lives. And it’s important for young people to be able to see people who are like them in the things they read and watch and to be able to imagine a life for themselves if their current location and circumstances don’t allow them to do it.
Additionally, whitewashing extends beyond the way you represent characters on the cover of books. It exists in your insistence on marketing books written by people of color as part of separate subgenres, even when their subject matter has little, if any, overlap. The fact that a book is written by an African American author does not make it a work of “African American fiction,” and it is quite a stretch to say that all works by African American authors are thematically similar enough to be accurately grouped together in the (entirely unhelpful) subgenre, or that the only people who will want to buy books by African American authors are other African Americans. (I’m using African American authors as the example here because examples of this are most readily available.)
Classifying a book based on the author’s ethnicity rather than its content implies that the author’s ethnicity is the book’s defining feature. Is that really the message you want to send?
We readers aren’t stupid. We know that you’re doing what you’re doing because it all comes down to dollars. And maybe you really do think you have to put white characters on covers and separate books by white authors from books by people of color in order to sell them. Or maybe you just aren’t thinking about it.
Whichever it is, it is a problem. And it has to stop. You can’t know that people will or won’t buy books with people of color in the pages or on the cover until you make those books available, and I’m willing to bet the feedback will be positive. And yes, we know that what you’re doing is about business, but it also has immeasurable social impact, and you should take some time to consider that as you make choices about which books you will publish and how you will package and market them.
These choices reflect your values as individuals and as companies, and we, your consumers, are paying attention.
We will choose to express our values and priorities in many different ways. Some of us are organizing a boycott. Others are planning to shine a light on authors and publishers who are leading the way. Some of us will write posts about our favorite books featuring characters of color, or our favorite authors who are people of color, or the personal experiences that shape our understanding of issues related to race or minority status (because, let’s face it, we could have a similar conversation about many so-called subgenres), and some of us will chime in with supportive comments. We will speak with many voices but one message.
And we hope like hell that you’ll be listening.
I’m pretty sure what post you’re talking about. I know once names started to get tossed around, I felt like backing out of the conversation which is not what you want to have happen when discussing an important issue. I’m not a big YA reader either so I really didn’t know what the book was about.
If nothing else, the conversation has brought more attention to PoC characters and authors. There could have been a much better way of doing this, of course, than this controversy.
Ditto on the message. You have a way with words!
Very well said, both your letter to publishers and your admonition of those who would interrupt this important conversation to feel good about themselves by calling people names.
It’s pretty typical to find mean-spirited souls in any community, even our generally happy friendly one. Still, it never fails to shock me at their audacity. Some people never grow up. Very well said Rebecca.
I know I tend to fall out of the loop on a lot of things like this, but even I know which one you’re talking about. I usually just ignore people’s comments when they get like that, and I agree with you that they totally missed the chance to discuss things intelligently.
I think it has to get out there, publically, and gain a united voice before publishers will care. As long as people are squabbling with one another, the world will pass them by unchanged.
Great post and letter. You hit the nail on the head.
Very good post. One thing that has changed since I was growing up was that back then, people were at least talking about matters of race in America. Nowadays, anyone who brings it up is likely to be ripped a new one. It seems to me to be another form of denial.
My first book, To the Ends of the Earth, has a major character who is African-American. At first I thought writing from York’s point of view was going to be hard. But it wasn’t. Who among us has not felt disrespected, disenfranchised? Who among us does not just try to muddle along, trying to be a good person in the face of his or her circumstances?
We are not so different. Whitewashing and political correctness are just two sides to the coin of “dumbing down.”
Thank you so much for this post. Many of us AA authors have discussed this topic among ourselves for many years–we are happy to have allies in this difficult conversation. We wonder why publishing decided to make “African American” a genre that encompasses all books written by black authors, when it is anything but that. But when a book like The Help or Secret Life of Bees, is about black characters but written by a white writer the book gets marketed to and read by both races. We have enormous difficulty getting our books with all (or mostly) black characters to “crossover” – save for a very few instances–even though the stories have little if anything to do with being black-they are about family, friends, life’s struggles, joys, challenges–like most novels.
We all know that we have white readers, because many of them identify themselves that way in their emails to us. But we don’t have nearly enough to keep us, as a group, from going extinct. (Addressed on our blog, twomindsfull(dot)blogspot(dot)com in an Open Letter to Oprah-Nov. 22, and Writing White Dec 3) Donna and I have sold well over a million copies of our books, but most white readers of “women’s fiction” have never heard of us-though we read Jodi Piccoult, Anne Tyler, Amy Tan, Elizabeth Berg, Adrianna Trigiani, Jen Weiner…you get the picture. We are all experiencing huge frustration at not being marketed to wider audiences. Example, I recently re-wrote the letter our publicist is sending with galleys of our new book omitting all references to race. Not surprisingly, the omission doesn’t change the story one iota, just who’ll likely pay attention. Of course our exasperation crosses over into many areas, our covers, our position in the bookstores, our lack of foreign rights sales–even to Africa and the Caribbean.
We are happy to have additional voices in our cruasade to bring the subject of diversity in reading front and center. As Donna and I say all the time, books should be windows, not just mirrors.
Add my name to that letter and let’s send it off.
it really made me sad that we have to go through this again after just dealing with Liar…
So true, Rebecca. The angelic/ethereal white-looking young women that seem to be constantly popping up on the covers of both YA and adult fiction actually turn me off from reading those books. They are just not relate-able; not only for non-white readers, but for white women who don’t look like that or feel like that. I admit, I even have a problem with the so-called classics, Jane Austen books and the like, because I just can’t seem to muster sympathy for the rich white female protagonists. I know those books have important historical and social implications for (white) women and so I am currently trying to buckle down and read them, but I still can’t help but thinking “what a small percentage of people who can actually ‘relate’ to this stuff.” We need, especially as Americans, to read and therefore learn about many different people. Just as our government should be representative of the actual racial and ethnic make-up of America (which, SIGH it doesn’t), so should books because you’re so right, they DO have an incredible impact on the worldviews of those reading them (and if that means youth, it’s so much more important). So thanks for this post, Book Lady, I hope it is well-received by the book blogging community.
Great post. I actually don’t know what other post you’re talking about (I was pretty MIA this weekend too), but I am kind of curious. Not because I’d care to read the nasty comments (I don’t), but because I wonder what other position there could have been besides the one you’ve taken above. Are there really people who think that white-washing book covers is a good, or at least not-so-bad thing? If that’s the case, I guess I find that a little… confusing.
Anyway, I agree with everything you’ve written here. I too hope publishers are listening.
Great post! Very inspiring! I don’t know what post you are referring too – but it makes me sad that people would behave like that. Very well said.
I don’t think many of the comments on the post you mention were abusive or unconstructive- dissenting yes, but racism is a complex issue where people have a wide range of opinions. Of course disagreement should be expressed courteously, but this issue is an emotive one so I can understand people getting a bit heated.
Heated can be done respectfully, and if we are, in fact, referring to the same post, I’m of the opinion that it many of the comments crossed the line and negated the potential for that post to be productive.
The disagreement was more about how the blogger approached the issue and particular statements she made—-I think pretty much everyone agrees that whitewashing is a problem.
I had never even realized “whitewashing” existed, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I do seem to see a lot of book covers with vague-ish white-ish people on the cover. It’s amazing what we’re blind to when we’re not really observing the world around us.
While I think you crafted a beautiful call to the publishing world, the part of your post that got to me most was the initial backlash on another blogger’s attempt to convey the same message. I haven’t seen the original, so I don’t know exactly what she said or why people reacted so negatively, but I wish more people would use common sense and respect when disagreeing with someone else. I thought comments were a space to expand on the discussion and engage with what you’re reading–I’m horrified that people are using them to turn blogging into an ugly battle where words are the bullets.
Thank you for re-presenting the issue for the people like me who had no idea of what was going on and for the call to publishers to join a world of diversity.
I, too, somehow missed this, as well as the “liar” issue. Now I feel compelled to go dig around and figure out what happened. I’ve been involved in a couple of blogging maelstroms, and I know how easy it is to stumble into a controversy unintentionally.
About race, I have two thoughts. One, isn’t it weird how stuff aimed at small children always seems to be carefully orchestrated to be “diverse”? It had never occurred to me how that gets switched off, probably around the same age we tell kids the truth about Santa. “Once upon a time, boys and girls, all races were treated equally and they were Best Friends!”
Second, I took a creative writing course in college, and I happened to see the protagonist as Asian. The entire class agreed that people should only write from their own race’s point of view. I grew up in a neighborhood that was at least 50% Asian, with families from almost every nation on that continent, so it seemed natural to me. *Shrug*
I moved to California partly because, after traveling a bit, I started to feel that Oregon was just too white. I wanted to see more variety in the faces around me. Obviously I feel the same about books, perhaps more so, and it looks like the majority of other readers agree.
I knew about the controversy, but missed the post (and am glad I did). This was a great post though! Thanks for writing it.
I totally missed this controversy. Thanks for addressing it and the issue. Curiously, I was just today wondering about this issue of lumping all African-American authors into one genre. I was looking for information on the book “Wench.” Certainly whites have proven that they will read books by African Americans (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker) and about African Americans (The Help, The Secret Life of Bees). If publishers and book stores would market books by and about African Americans in the same way they do books by white authors, there’s no doubt in my mind that those books would be judged based on their merits.
I guess there must be a natural tendency among humans to classify and pigeonhole stuff…all stuff. That said, there is no excuse for what’s going on with the whitewashing of covers or marketing mainstream titles written by African Americans as though they are genre works. This is deplorable and not necessary…even to make a buck.
I’m glad you wrote this article to gin up a better conversation than the one that came out of the first effort to call attention to these practices–all of which was something of which I have been unaware. Thank you for opening my eyes. I’d have to say that when making a book selection the two things I don’t pay attention to, EVER, are the publisher or the author’s photo. I judge my reading material by the content alone. And I’ll bet that’s true of most readers.
Publishers certainly set the standard on this issue, but bookstores play a large role, also. B & N puts all fiction together (as I believe they should), while Borders has a separated African American fiction section. And boy oh boy, does it cover a WIDE array of subject matter.
What I’m not sure many people know is how this very issue is affecting, or more accurately disaffecting an entire segment of writers–black “mid-list”novelists. Not the few who live in the rarefied literary echelons—those you mentioned Lisa, Stephen Carter, Edwidge Dandicat, etc. are doing fine—they enjoy the support of the media and the “wider” (whiter) population.
The literary marginalization that is taking place largely affects those of us in the middle-much like the economy today. There are many of us who have/had careers courtesy of Terry McMillan. We came along right after the success of Waiting to Exhale and found a warm welcome for a career we had longed for but so often found beyond our reach. Terry proved, what we had always known, that black folks read, and would buy books featuring characters they personally identify with. Not that black readers would stop reading the non-black authors they’d always read and enjoyed, we would just enjoy a wider choice. But somehow that wider choice was not necessarily practiced, (or expected by the publishing community) from the other side. A recent blog listed the 100 best “Chicklit” books–the only book by a black author was Waiting to Exhale–like there haven’t been any more black chicklit authors since 1992!?
Not to take anything away from The Help or The Secret Life of Bees, but books on similar topics have been written by black writers but have not received the marketing push that these books have. We black writers don’t even get our books marketed in African countries, while The Help is a bestseller there and has received an award in South Africa.
Members of our ‘class’ include among others, the award winning Tina McElroy Ansa and Bernice McFadden. Last year, author Carleen Brice,started “December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Someone Not Black Month.” She also created a blog called Welcomewhitefolks.com.
For the past 20 years, Donna Grant, my writing partner, and I have been writing novels, 7 in total. No Pulitzer or Nobel winners, but well crafted stories that have enlightened and entertained tens of thousands of readers. Our first “big book” Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made was published in 1997, has never been out of print, is in its fifth edition and sold well over 750,000 copies, without any major advertising or endorsements. And yet we, along with many of our “classmates” find our careers in jeopardy- not because we write bad books, but because we all fall in the the publisher created genre, African American Fiction. We write women’s fiction with predominantly black characters–stories of struggle and triumph, loss, coping, love, and life, learning. But we are labeled, handicapped, before we’re out of the gate. Those who are expecting urban/street lit are disappointed, and those (white folks) who might enjoy our work because the theme might be relevant to their life (like What Doesn’t Kill You, our last book about a woman who loses her job after 25 yrs and has to reinvent herself), don’t ever see it because it’s in “that” section. We have actually had white readers write to us and say they enjoyed our book(s) but hesitated to pick it up because it might not be OK for them since it’s Af Am! Really!! We wrote a blog (twomindsfull(dot)blogspot(dot)com-Nov 20) about this subject a few years ago and repost it every year–because, sadly, it’s still relevant.
I have to agree with Rebecca in that I also felt that a great deal of the comments were abusive, completely out of line and just hateful. Which made them completely counter productive.
This was a great post Rebecca and I’m not a bit YA either and was also pretty much MIA this week due to school and just enjoying reading all week!
Great letter and very well written post.
Gayla
Wonderful post – well said!
[...] check out the posts from Eva, Bookshelves of Doom, Vasilly, Doret, Susan, Amy, The Book Smugglers, Rebecca, and Salon.com. Bloomsbury has since released a very brief statement that they will be changing the [...]
Great post, Rebecca. I will just say “Ditto.” It is sad when people start name calling, I agree. But I think (not at ALL to justify) that when people get really emotional/passionate about a topic, they speak/type before they think. It’s a lot easier to name call a person you don’t have to look at.
Wow you sure know how to say things. I too ignored those certain comments on the post and in fact didn’t even read them all, just a select few before leaving my own. It’s sad that this happened again and with the same publisher.
What you said about not knowing if books with people of colour on the cover would sell or not is so true. How would they know if they are rarely on the cover?
[...] one year anniversary of Carleen Brice’s blog Welcome White Folks, Rebecca TheBookLadysBlog on An Invitation to Dialogue on Diversity in Media after the Salon.com article about the “whitewashing” of yet another book cover, and young book [...]