White Mind in Writing COCs
So how can it be that in 2010, this is where we find ourselves:
This is a recent article making the rounds that pertains to the amount of COC in children's books. I highly recommend everybody reads the rest and also the comments. One comment tells the story of how an author wasn't even allowed to have a hardware store worker be black because it would be offensive.
The lack of COCs in the fantasy genre always bothered me. I loved fantasy books but almost everyone I read had a white main character and any person darker than white was a mystical creature with white facial features(Dark Elves, Dwarves, etc.) or were ugly because they had bigger non-white features along with being dumb as a rock(Orcs, Ogres).
Here's a disheartening activity for everybody, think of some books with main COCs you have read (with the cover-art reflecting that), now compare their sales with books in the same genre that have white people on the cover.
Anybody have more thoughts or experiences with how people reacted to their non-white characters?
- The percentage of published children’s books featuring characters of color is far smaller than - perhaps less than half - the percentage of people of color in the U.S. population, and the majority of these books are still created by white writers and illustrators.
- Many of the most popular book series, particularly in fantasy, have no significant characters of color at all.
- Cases of “whitewashing” book jackets, of editors requesting that an author erase a character’s ethnicity so that a book “can reach a larger audience,” of booksellers or librarians passing on certain titles because “our community doesn’t respond to those kinds of books,” suggest an assumption that white readers won’t respond to characters of color.
This is a recent article making the rounds that pertains to the amount of COC in children's books. I highly recommend everybody reads the rest and also the comments. One comment tells the story of how an author wasn't even allowed to have a hardware store worker be black because it would be offensive.
The lack of COCs in the fantasy genre always bothered me. I loved fantasy books but almost everyone I read had a white main character and any person darker than white was a mystical creature with white facial features(Dark Elves, Dwarves, etc.) or were ugly because they had bigger non-white features along with being dumb as a rock(Orcs, Ogres).
Here's a disheartening activity for everybody, think of some books with main COCs you have read (with the cover-art reflecting that), now compare their sales with books in the same genre that have white people on the cover.
Anybody have more thoughts or experiences with how people reacted to their non-white characters?