Wynderlon

There’s an interesting blog post on Genre Reviews about Bloomsbury white-washing their book covers (the link is actually the final outcome to the whole debacle, but includes all the links to the previous posts about it). To quote Publisher’s Weekly:

Earlier this week, criticism grew online over the cover of Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass, a January fantasy novel from Bloomsbury Children’s Books—the second time in recent months one of the publisher’s covers has come under fire. [...] The controversy calls to mind the online furor last summer over Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, also published by Bloomsbury, in which the cover used an image of a white girl, when the protagonist is described in the book as being half-black. [...] In the case of Magic Under Glass, the circumstances—a discrepancy between the description of a character’s ethnicity in the book and her appearance on the cover—are much the same. The protagonist, Nimira, is described in the story as having brown skin and considered by others to have “exotic” features.

As a “person of color” (ugh, I hate that term), I lament when I see these kinds of things. I had a slew of thoughts when I read this article. Most of which went something like this:

1. I’m very disappointed that they white washed books, but I’m not surprised. I’ve picked up books where the cover art doesn’t match what the heroine is described as. Romance books are particularly bad at this; a lot of them seem to just slap whatever cheesy heroine-with-hero cover they can find. More recently, I’ve been reading the Saga of the Noble Dead. I’m on book 4 and only now are the covers actually reflecting how the characters are meant to look. The books often say the female character doesn’t like wearing anything “pretty” or “flashy,” and usually sticks to plain, simple clothes that make fighting easier (or, at the most, “professional”). Before, all the covers made the female heroine look like a porno or bad B movie reject: huge boobs, plump red lips, tight bordering-on-dominatrix clothes. Since I oftentimes judge books I pick up by their covers, if the books hadn’t been highly recommended to me by a friend, I’d've most likely passed them by as “another fantasy clone.”
2. What’s so bad about having a non-white person on the cover? Do they really think they’ll sell less books? I remember writing a post about how every urban fantasy cover looks the same: a [usually white] woman’s back, usually wearing some sort of backless shirt and holding either a gun or a sword/knife. Wouldn’t something different from the same-old entice people? I know it’s worked for me before.
3. I hate it when non-white people are described as “exotic.” (It’s kind of a nicer way of saying “different from ‘the norm’.”) What does that even mean?

Anyway, reading about this made me, once again, reflect on my own writing choices. It’s tough to incorporate a race different than your own, I won’t lie. And you don’t want to purposefully put someone there that’s clearly the “racial minority” (I remember how every cartoon when I was a child seemed to have one African-American and one chick — or sometimes, an African-American chick. It’s a two-fer!¹ ) I wish I added more non-white characters to my books. For a long while, I was tempted to make Tayce Lebanese (I was thinking she’d be a phoenix), but in the end England and France served as a better place for her back story. I have plans for non-European myths for the series and I hope to incorporate a “global” world.

Am I being overly sensitive? Maybe. It’s difficult not to be. If I had a penny for every time I’ve been asked, “Where are you from?” after introducing myself² (to which I like to reply, “Chicago” or, if I particularly don’t like the person, “Earth”) or, worse, I’ve actually had a person say to me, after telling them my parents are from India, “Oh…where’s that?”