"Well, maybe she's just PRETENDING to be black," or, further news in whitewashing
(Thank you ajodasso for alerting me to this piece of fail)
Okay. So. Book covers are often crap, we know that. Swedish publishers EBFA for one seem to take an honour in soaking up excellent YA novels and republishing them with boring and/or abstract covers teens wouldn't look twice at. Nothing new there.
But when the cover changes not only the looks but the ethnicity of the protagonist, it's really a supreme level of shittiness. (See also
unfunnybusiness for more links.)
And as always, there are commenters claiming that it's okay for Bloomsbury to make crappy racist decisions like that, because they're just trying to make money after all.
To which I say the same thing I said about the Airbender fiasco: The sound decision, then, is to not give them the money, and to vocally say why you're not doing so, so that they can change their policy. There's an Australian edition. Buy that. (Even though it does have an abstract cover.) Or if that's not an option, buy the American, make your own cover for it, and send a photo of the home-made cover to Bloomsbury. (That can be a great exercise for a school class. And I'd love to see some cover suggestions from fan artists.)
To shrug and go "but white kids won't read books about black kids" is even worse. Recently, Marta Brockenbrough wrote an article called Are We Letting Boys be Book Bigots? That can easily be rephrased to "Are we letting white kids be book bigots?" Because if you know the white kids will make those kinds of decisions in their reading and you don't make any moves to stop that, you're allowing racism to spread in the young generation. (Not to mention the message it sends to the kids of other ethnicities!)
Yes, I know I complain about abstract book covers because "kids don't like them". But if kids refuse to read book with abstract covers, it hurts no one except the cover artists - and the kids themselves missing out on some great books. If kids refuse to read books based on race and gender, it's symptomatic of a problem that hurts a whole lot of people.
This piece of fail reminded me of when my dad wrote an article about Islam for Nationalencyklopedin. They wanted to illustrate it with a photo of a veiled woman carrying an automatic rifle. Dad declared that they'd have to do that over his dead body, and suggested a photo from the Friday prayer in a Swedish mosque. They insisted. The whole thing went back and forth until he threatened to pull the article, at which point they finally relented. The published picture does show a mosque - a Middle Eastern mosque.
Dad could threaten to pull the article. An author of fiction doesn't even have that threat - unless you're JKR, there's plenty of fish in the sea for the publisher. That's why, in instances like this, the readers can't just sit back and hope that the issue will resolve itself.
Okay. So. Book covers are often crap, we know that. Swedish publishers EBFA for one seem to take an honour in soaking up excellent YA novels and republishing them with boring and/or abstract covers teens wouldn't look twice at. Nothing new there.
But when the cover changes not only the looks but the ethnicity of the protagonist, it's really a supreme level of shittiness. (See also
unfunnybusiness for more links.)
And as always, there are commenters claiming that it's okay for Bloomsbury to make crappy racist decisions like that, because they're just trying to make money after all.
To which I say the same thing I said about the Airbender fiasco: The sound decision, then, is to not give them the money, and to vocally say why you're not doing so, so that they can change their policy. There's an Australian edition. Buy that. (Even though it does have an abstract cover.) Or if that's not an option, buy the American, make your own cover for it, and send a photo of the home-made cover to Bloomsbury. (That can be a great exercise for a school class. And I'd love to see some cover suggestions from fan artists.)
To shrug and go "but white kids won't read books about black kids" is even worse. Recently, Marta Brockenbrough wrote an article called Are We Letting Boys be Book Bigots? That can easily be rephrased to "Are we letting white kids be book bigots?" Because if you know the white kids will make those kinds of decisions in their reading and you don't make any moves to stop that, you're allowing racism to spread in the young generation. (Not to mention the message it sends to the kids of other ethnicities!)
Yes, I know I complain about abstract book covers because "kids don't like them". But if kids refuse to read book with abstract covers, it hurts no one except the cover artists - and the kids themselves missing out on some great books. If kids refuse to read books based on race and gender, it's symptomatic of a problem that hurts a whole lot of people.
This piece of fail reminded me of when my dad wrote an article about Islam for Nationalencyklopedin. They wanted to illustrate it with a photo of a veiled woman carrying an automatic rifle. Dad declared that they'd have to do that over his dead body, and suggested a photo from the Friday prayer in a Swedish mosque. They insisted. The whole thing went back and forth until he threatened to pull the article, at which point they finally relented. The published picture does show a mosque - a Middle Eastern mosque.
Dad could threaten to pull the article. An author of fiction doesn't even have that threat - unless you're JKR, there's plenty of fish in the sea for the publisher. That's why, in instances like this, the readers can't just sit back and hope that the issue will resolve itself.