"Well, maybe she's just PRETENDING to be black," or, further news in whitewashing

[kattahj]

(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

Comments

[alara_r]

What I found really stupid, in reading about it on that blog article you linked to, was the publisher perception that white people won't read books by black authors.

White people don't *know* what color the damn author is!

If the book is sold in the black people ghetto of the bookstore, and not anywhere else, then damn skippy the white people won't be reading it, because the white people are browsing in the "main" areas for their particular interest (regular fiction, or romance, or sci-fi/fantasy, or whatever.) But if the books written by black people were to be shelved in the same place as the books written by white people, the white people will buy the books, because you can't *see* the color of the author to be racist about it, and while there are some first names that do telegraph that the author's probably black, there are a *lot* of first names that don't (and black people use initials too; there's a series of paranormal romances about a black vampire huntress written by a black woman, with black people on the cover, sold in the African-American section, and she uses initials. Plainly, not to avoid people thinking she's black.) So the majority of books by black people will not be perceived by white buyers to be *by* black people, if they're not sold in only the African-American Interest section, until after they've bought the book. No one looks at the picture of the author before deciding to buy.

I can see the perception that white people won't buy a book with a black person on the *cover*. My personal feeling is that white people are a lot less blanketly racist than that, and a lot of us very much would buy the book, as long as it's sold in the section we're actually looking in. But the perception that white people won't buy books by black *authors?* Where the *fuck* does that even come from?

[kattahj]

I'm kind of surprised that there even is a black people ghetto - our bookstores usually have separate sections for fantasy, sci-fi, crime, and possibly horror, but that's about it. (I do remember a library having a section for "entertainment", which, bwuh? If the other books aren't entertaining, why have them? Esp. since Anna Karenina was in the entertainment section...) To have the books by black people shelved as "urban" seems even stranger, because what if they're not urban? Toni Morrison's books aren't urban...

I'm reminded of a Swedish author who said apropos the word "kvinnoböcker" = "women's books" - "What are women's books? Children's books are books for children, doctor books are books about doctors, debute books are books by debutants, but women's books? Some books by women are about women, some books about women are for women, but it's just some." Shelving books as "black" books seems to have the same problem.