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IBARW and whitewashing on genre book covers
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ibarw.
My plan to write fic again this year, uh, fell through. In a major way. And beyond that, I can't think of much to say other than navel-gazing about my own whiteness and unrecognized privilege, and while there may be a time and a place for that, I don't feel that this is either.
But reading through the links fromibarw, I stumbled across one topic that I realized I actually do have something to say about. It's something that's fairly close to my heart as both a writer and a sci-fi/fantasy reader -- the way that dark-skinned characters are whitewashed on fantasy and science fiction book covers. There is a great post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
smillaraaq on whitewashing on Joan Vinge's "Cat" books, that got me thinking about the whole issue of PoC characters in genre fiction being depicted as white -- whether as a marketing ploy or simply as a cultural default.
Assmillaraaq's post touches upon, it's not like it happens occasionally, by accident, when the artist had an inaccurate or inadequate description of the character. It's everywhere, all over the place. It speaks to the unstated assumption that white=default, that white "sells". And, when there are already few enough characters of color in genre fiction, it makes those who do exist all the more invisible.
I went to my own bookshelves looking for examples, and didn't have to look far -- and, worse, both the books I found, in the first few minutes of looking, are new books, published without the last ten years or so. This isn't something that used to happen back in the 1960s and 70s but doesn't happen anymore. It's ongoing.
One that has been bothering me because I was just discussing it with a friend is Carol Berg's Transformation, in which it's made clear that the main character and his people are dark. But on the cover, we have this:
(I am not even going to begin to try to figure out WTF is up with the glowing green wings.)
Another book I have is Serpent Mage by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman:
Okay. The girl on the balcony could be one of two characters, since, of the human or generally human-looking characters in the book, there are really only two that fit. One of them is, yes, blond. But she's barely seen in the book (I don't remember that she even has a speaking part) and dies off-camera about halfway through. The other, who has a large role in the book and is therefore a much better candidate to be on the cover, is described like this:
So they did one of two things here: either they chose to depict the white character who has almost no role at all in the book (or simply a generic woman who isn't meant to be any specific character -- and, therefore, clearly, the default for "princess" is presumed to be blond-haired and white even in a book where it's nothing of the sort) -- or the girl who is very obviously supposed to be African-looking in the book is blond and white-skinned on the cover.
I seriously do wonder what goes through the artists' heads when they do this. Is it because white is the cultural default, so that when they think "princess" or "swordsman" or "wizard", all they can manage to see is a white template? Is it because they send a layout to the art manager and it comes back with "Too ethnic - no mass appeal" scribbled across it? Some of both?
You might think this wouldn't happen in graphic novels, because the characters on the cover are basically drawn as they are in the book, but ... not exactly. There are definitely cases I can think of (and, as with mass-market paperbacks, probably many that aren't coming to mind or that I haven't seen) where a fairly dark character in the book was represented as a lighter shade on the cover. For example, Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest. This one doesn't even have the excuse that the cover artist is a different person, since they're self-published and Wendy Pini does all the art herself.
The Sun Folk are dark-skinned, and one of them, Leetah, is a major character. (See my icon! Leetah is NOT white.) But this is not at all evident on many of the original covers. For example, the original cover to the 1980s graphic novel of Elfquest: Book 1 depicts Leetah (far right in sparkly dress) in the exact same (Caucasian) skin tones as the other characters.
Her darker coloring is a little more evident on the cover to the second issue (this dates back to the late 1970s) but, two issues later, she's basically white again, and there's no excuse for this. It's not as if the author doesn't know what color her skin is. (Note: I'm not touching any of the OTHER issues with Elfquest's color-coding and exoticism here. There are areas where I think they did very well and areas that make me wince, but that could be a whole post all by itself.)
I don't think Wendy Pini was sitting around thinking "I have to make Leetah white on the cover or no one will buy the book" because, well, she wrote it; if she wanted to make Leetah pale-skinned, she could have done so. What's going on here is subtle and insidious as much as it's overt. It's what you get when you dig deep down into the artist's bag of symbols that we carry around in our brains and dredge up the symbol that our culture has given us for "glamorous" or "beautiful" or "best-seller" and come up with a white woman with flowing hair.
I know that I've seen Marvel and DC covers that depict supposedly PoC characters like Storm, etc., looking white (or in Storm's case, maybe I should say whiter than usual), but none of the X-Men trades on my bookshelf is a good example, so I had to go to the Internet. Probably the worst one I found was this depiction of Storm from one of the Ultimates covers. African. Yeah. (Oh, but -- random, mostly-unrelated-to-this-post geekgasm -- look what I else I found, while I was doing a Google image search for Storm. X-Men Lego rip-offs! Aren't they awesome? I WANT WANT WANT. And it actually does relate to this post, at least a little bit, because check out the two side-by-side versions of Storm in her original and new Ultimates costumes ... and respectively variable skin tones.)
Actually, in general, I think Marvel and DC have been worse with the whitewashing over the last ten years or so. Part of it is just that the coloring is less flat and more affected by lighting than it used to be (all the characters look a bit off for someone who, like me, was used to the flat four-tone colors of 1970s and early 1980s comics), but I do seem to notice, with no real empirical evidence to back this up, that the black characters, on both the covers and interior art, are often being depicted a lot lighter than they used to be. Since I haven't bought all that many Marvel and DC comics in the last ten years, though, I could really use a second (third, fourth, fifth) opinion on this. It's scary to contemplate that we might be, not only failing to make progress on visible CoC in mainstream comics, but going backwards.
Thoughts on this? I've thought about it a little bit before, in a vague and unformed sort of way, but this is the first time I've tried to organize it into a coherent post. I would welcome any more examples that others have. I know that there is quite a lot of this sort of thing going on, and I know I've seen more examples, but I'm having trouble thinking of them -- and, also, I'm quite sure there are plenty of times that I never even noticed, just like I never noticed, until having it pointed out, that Vinge's Cat is not as white as he appears on the cover of the book. (I'm also sure that it's been written about before, probably much better than I've managed to do, and if anyone has a link to other posts or articles on this, that would be very welcome as well.)
ibarw.My plan to write fic again this year, uh, fell through. In a major way. And beyond that, I can't think of much to say other than navel-gazing about my own whiteness and unrecognized privilege, and while there may be a time and a place for that, I don't feel that this is either.
But reading through the links from
ibarw, I stumbled across one topic that I realized I actually do have something to say about. It's something that's fairly close to my heart as both a writer and a sci-fi/fantasy reader -- the way that dark-skinned characters are whitewashed on fantasy and science fiction book covers. There is a great post by smillaraaq on whitewashing on Joan Vinge's "Cat" books, that got me thinking about the whole issue of PoC characters in genre fiction being depicted as white -- whether as a marketing ploy or simply as a cultural default.As
smillaraaq's post touches upon, it's not like it happens occasionally, by accident, when the artist had an inaccurate or inadequate description of the character. It's everywhere, all over the place. It speaks to the unstated assumption that white=default, that white "sells". And, when there are already few enough characters of color in genre fiction, it makes those who do exist all the more invisible.I went to my own bookshelves looking for examples, and didn't have to look far -- and, worse, both the books I found, in the first few minutes of looking, are new books, published without the last ten years or so. This isn't something that used to happen back in the 1960s and 70s but doesn't happen anymore. It's ongoing.
One that has been bothering me because I was just discussing it with a friend is Carol Berg's Transformation, in which it's made clear that the main character and his people are dark. But on the cover, we have this:
(I am not even going to begin to try to figure out WTF is up with the glowing green wings.)
Another book I have is Serpent Mage by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman:
Okay. The girl on the balcony could be one of two characters, since, of the human or generally human-looking characters in the book, there are really only two that fit. One of them is, yes, blond. But she's barely seen in the book (I don't remember that she even has a speaking part) and dies off-camera about halfway through. The other, who has a large role in the book and is therefore a much better candidate to be on the cover, is described like this:
Her skin is a dark ebony. Her black hair is braided in countless tiny braids that hang down her back, each braid ending in beads of blue and orange (her tribal colors) and brass. ... She wore the accepted dress of Phondra, a single piece of blue and orange cloth wound around the body.
So they did one of two things here: either they chose to depict the white character who has almost no role at all in the book (or simply a generic woman who isn't meant to be any specific character -- and, therefore, clearly, the default for "princess" is presumed to be blond-haired and white even in a book where it's nothing of the sort) -- or the girl who is very obviously supposed to be African-looking in the book is blond and white-skinned on the cover.
I seriously do wonder what goes through the artists' heads when they do this. Is it because white is the cultural default, so that when they think "princess" or "swordsman" or "wizard", all they can manage to see is a white template? Is it because they send a layout to the art manager and it comes back with "Too ethnic - no mass appeal" scribbled across it? Some of both?
You might think this wouldn't happen in graphic novels, because the characters on the cover are basically drawn as they are in the book, but ... not exactly. There are definitely cases I can think of (and, as with mass-market paperbacks, probably many that aren't coming to mind or that I haven't seen) where a fairly dark character in the book was represented as a lighter shade on the cover. For example, Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest. This one doesn't even have the excuse that the cover artist is a different person, since they're self-published and Wendy Pini does all the art herself.
The Sun Folk are dark-skinned, and one of them, Leetah, is a major character. (See my icon! Leetah is NOT white.) But this is not at all evident on many of the original covers. For example, the original cover to the 1980s graphic novel of Elfquest: Book 1 depicts Leetah (far right in sparkly dress) in the exact same (Caucasian) skin tones as the other characters.
Her darker coloring is a little more evident on the cover to the second issue (this dates back to the late 1970s) but, two issues later, she's basically white again, and there's no excuse for this. It's not as if the author doesn't know what color her skin is. (Note: I'm not touching any of the OTHER issues with Elfquest's color-coding and exoticism here. There are areas where I think they did very well and areas that make me wince, but that could be a whole post all by itself.)
I don't think Wendy Pini was sitting around thinking "I have to make Leetah white on the cover or no one will buy the book" because, well, she wrote it; if she wanted to make Leetah pale-skinned, she could have done so. What's going on here is subtle and insidious as much as it's overt. It's what you get when you dig deep down into the artist's bag of symbols that we carry around in our brains and dredge up the symbol that our culture has given us for "glamorous" or "beautiful" or "best-seller" and come up with a white woman with flowing hair.
I know that I've seen Marvel and DC covers that depict supposedly PoC characters like Storm, etc., looking white (or in Storm's case, maybe I should say whiter than usual), but none of the X-Men trades on my bookshelf is a good example, so I had to go to the Internet. Probably the worst one I found was this depiction of Storm from one of the Ultimates covers. African. Yeah. (Oh, but -- random, mostly-unrelated-to-this-post geekgasm -- look what I else I found, while I was doing a Google image search for Storm. X-Men Lego rip-offs! Aren't they awesome? I WANT WANT WANT. And it actually does relate to this post, at least a little bit, because check out the two side-by-side versions of Storm in her original and new Ultimates costumes ... and respectively variable skin tones.)
Actually, in general, I think Marvel and DC have been worse with the whitewashing over the last ten years or so. Part of it is just that the coloring is less flat and more affected by lighting than it used to be (all the characters look a bit off for someone who, like me, was used to the flat four-tone colors of 1970s and early 1980s comics), but I do seem to notice, with no real empirical evidence to back this up, that the black characters, on both the covers and interior art, are often being depicted a lot lighter than they used to be. Since I haven't bought all that many Marvel and DC comics in the last ten years, though, I could really use a second (third, fourth, fifth) opinion on this. It's scary to contemplate that we might be, not only failing to make progress on visible CoC in mainstream comics, but going backwards.
Thoughts on this? I've thought about it a little bit before, in a vague and unformed sort of way, but this is the first time I've tried to organize it into a coherent post. I would welcome any more examples that others have. I know that there is quite a lot of this sort of thing going on, and I know I've seen more examples, but I'm having trouble thinking of them -- and, also, I'm quite sure there are plenty of times that I never even noticed, just like I never noticed, until having it pointed out, that Vinge's Cat is not as white as he appears on the cover of the book. (I'm also sure that it's been written about before, probably much better than I've managed to do, and if anyone has a link to other posts or articles on this, that would be very welcome as well.)
no subject
It's not about finding qualified actors, it's about the fact that science fiction, in particular, is still very, very white. Not as "male" as it was, but that's only by the sheer amount of effort being put forth by women