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IBARW and whitewashing on genre book covers

This week is International Blog Against Racism Week. Information and ongoing link roundup at

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.)

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One comment: The travesty of a miniseries that Sci Fi channel made from LeGuin's "Earthsea" series. The only casting I could agree with was Danny Glover for Ogion and Kristin Kreuk (?) for Arha. The rest of it? TOTALLY whitewashed the cast. Pissed me off from the get go, and then I heard what they'd done to the story. But the most egregious error was the casting. How hard would it have been to find a young Adam Beach type to play Sparrowhawk? A truly dark-skinned African-American to play Vetch? But nooooo, they had to go with the blue-eyed white boy as the main character. *Shrieks*

I wonder how much of these decisions is entirely artist's choice and how much is them doing what publishing companies tell them to draw?

Because, wow, yeah, that is scary.

(on that note, because my brain is too tired to be thinky, 1) X-MEN legos FTW! and 2) anytime you feel like settling down with Teal'c my offer to talk canon is open)

I'd love to read your thoughts on Elfquest if you ever get around to it. I haven't read them since I was about thirteen, and I wasn't aware of problematic portrayals at the time. I've been thinking of revisiting the series again soon.

I'm only just getting into X-Men comics now so I don't really have an informed opinion. Wish I could help. :\

I can't comment specifically on Earthsea because I've not read the books, nor seen the miniseries in its entirety. And I'm not defending whitewashing or whitecasting on principle (because life without diversity is dishonest and ignorant, not to mention boring).

But I will say that there's a key difference between a written/drawn series and a live-action series; notably being that you have to find a convincing actor. No, a good actor.

No, the best damn actor you can find for that part.

Sometimes (especially in adaptations), ethnicities can be tangled with if they're not deemed "essential" to the main story by the filmmakers. I'm not saying this is a good thing by any stretch of the imagination. It's not, and it should change. But it happens, quite possibly due to a lower number of performers (and heck, writers/producers/directors!) from minority backgrounds. It's the rule of 100: See a 100 actors for the role, you might find a great one. Consider only 10, chances are you'll only get mediocre.

This reminds me of a circular conversation I had with an RL friend in Melbourne, a performer whose family comes from Singapore. He complained that there are very few roles for people of Asian descent in most western performance art (plays, musicals, etc). We had a long, long conversation about whether this is because there appear to be few Asian performers around, and why it appears that there are few performers with an Asian background in the performing arts... are people who might have gone into the arts put off by the perceived lack of opportunities, or are fewer opprtunities even created due to the perceived lack of performers?

Sorry for going a bit OT there, but I think it's something that needs to be considered when we start talking about life-action.

I've heard the "no qualified performers" argument before, but honestly, I don't think it holds much water -- or, at least, if there *is* a legitimate shortage of actors, it's only half the story, and the less interesting half, at that: it's effect, and not cause. That is, if the last ten movies your studio has made have featured white actors in the Big Hero with a Gun role, it's not too surprising if very few Asian actors show up to the casting call. It's not that they aren't around; it's just that they have no reasonable expectation of getting the role, particularly if the studio makes no effort at outreach or at casting against the prevailing types.

There's something more subtle and hard to fight going on, too, and while I guess there's no way I can know for sure that this is what's happening, just based on my own experiences at "casting" my own original stories and OCs, I think that the casting staff are almost certainly trying to fit the actors they see against a pre-conceived character template (even if it's entirely unconscious) that's heavily influenced by prevailing cultural tropes. It doesn't matter how qualified the actors are; the casting director (and the people they answer to, as well) are trying to fit them to an incredibly subjective idea of how this character looks and speaks and moves -- and that, in turn, is going to be influenced by their subconscious ideal of how a Hero or a Princess or a Bad Guy looks and sounds and moves. We've all absorbed these ideas, and unless we deliberately try to play against type a little bit, it's going to come out in the casting -- it can't not come out in the casting.

Ultimately, once you've ruled out the blatantly bad actors, what they're looking for is not precisely the "best" actor, it's the one that most closely fits the unconscious mental template. And that's quite likely going to be pretty stereotypical.

I read (and loved) Elfquest as a kid, and wasn't really thinking about any of this stuff at the time. I still admire it a lot, and it was a big influence on me as an artist at an impressionable age.

The big thing in Elfquest that bothers me as an adult, though, is how the humans are depicted as brutish and primitive and dark, where the elves (the elfin ancestors in particular) are beautiful and pale and civilized and light. It's not as if that's an unusual dichotomy in fantasy, and in a lot of ways they are drawing on stereotypes that are already out there, but ... it's there, and it's all throughout the original series. It's mitigated by the way that a lot of the casting does go against "type" -- the Wolfrider/Sun Folk dichotomy especially, with the civilized Sun Folk being the darker ones. But, still ... the dark skin on the humans is so unnecessary, I think is what really gets to me. For one thing, it's canon that the elves took their shape from human legends, so for the elves to be so pale in contrast to what the humans look like, especially with so much of the rest of their world-building being so comparatively well thought out ... it strikes me as lazy world-building -- falling back on a pervasive and problematic stereotype of "dark=primitive", "light=civilized". It wouldn't bother me so much if there was any other reason for it to be in there.

Thank you. I remembered the Wolfrider/Sun Folk thing but not the portrayal of the humans. You're right, that does seem unnecessary in this 'verse, and the dark=primitive stereotype is definitely problematic and everywhere.

I wonder how much of these decisions is entirely artist's choice and how much is them doing what publishing companies tell them to draw?

Yeah, I was wondering that, too. I suspect a little of both. I mean, I know that sometimes the artist doesn't even get any direction beyond "we want a painting of a knight storming a castle" or something like that. But even in a case like that, the artist's default is obviously "white" and that's a problem.

anytime you feel like settling down with Teal'c my offer to talk canon is open

Which I really do appreciate! Right now, I'm trying to concentrate as much as possible on original fic and on finishing up my outstanding obligations, but I'm still noodling with my Teal'c ideas in the back of my head.

It was actually the Earthsea miniseries (well, reading and working through the reactions to it, and *my* reaction to it, and reconciling them) that made me realize why this sort of thing is so problematic. It's not that I hadn't noticed the pervasive whiteness of sci-fi and fantasy, because I had, and I'd even tried to cast my own in different ways (with mixed success). But, beyond being irritated by it, I don't think I really got why it was a problem, on all the many levels that it's a problem, before Earthsea.

Did you see Le Guin's own commentary on the travesty of the Earthsea mini? http://www.mccmedia.com/pipermail/brin-l/Week-of-Mon-20041213/026413.html (http://www.mccmedia.com/pipermail/brin-l/Week-of-Mon-20041213/026413.html)

One particularly chilling, relevant bit:

Time went by. By the time they got backing from the Sci Fi Channel for a miniseries -- and Robert Halmi Sr. had come aboard -- they had lost Boyen.

That was a blow. But I had just seen Mr Halmi's miniseries Dreamkeeper with its stunning Native American cast, so I said to them in a phone conversation, hey, maybe Mr Halmi will cast some of those great actors in Earthsea! -- Oh, no, I was told -- Mr Halmi had found those people impossible to work with.

"Well," I said, "you do realise that almost everybody in Earthsea is
'those people,' or anyhow not white?"

love your leetah avatar, i used to read elfquest all the time

but i do get your point

Thank you! This was actually one of the first icons I made when I got on LJ. *feels nostalgic*

Word.

It is confusing on top of being racist as well. I ranted about this before, but the cover of Fire Logic by Laurie Marks is another examole, through half of the book I kept waiting for another important character to appear, because there was this white woman with flowing red hair wearing armor and weapons on the cover, who I assumed must be some important character, but the main female character I encountered first was dark skinned and also wearing many braids. It wasn't until the middle of the book that I concluded that the cover was just crap with no real relation to the content.

hehe cool though :) i kind of feel i out grew them a bit hehe i used to read them in highschool

i always loved skywise

It's always strange to see cover art where it's pretty clear that either the artist never got any author's notes on the subject, or just did whatever they wanted anyway. (Tangent: in Sweden, a bunch of fantasy books have been published with covers arbitrarily snatched from other English books/RPG manuals/random fantasy-ish art.)

But when someone somewhere along the line takes this as an opportunity to whitewash the characters of color present in the book, it becomes more than just "strange".

The examples above are good ones. I'm still boggling at what they did to Seyonne on the Transformation cover. And the Death Gate one - that's extra sad because all the covers do portray things from the books. Just look at Dragonwing, which has a pretty decent little Hugh on it. But, of course the "princess" has to be blond.

I'm so used to artists/editors/whoever deciding to stick white people on the cover of everything, that I actually notice when they get it right. Lately, I read Ursula Le Guin's Annals of the Western Shore books, and: look here!
Voices & Powers. (Couldn't get a larger image, but it's got Look Inside the Book, which has the cover.)

Both of these characters actually look like she describes them! (Which is very much non-white - as a matter of fact, I don't think there are any white people in those books? At least not of the blond, blue-eyed variety.) I think it says so much about this phenomenon that I'm actually surprised by this.

Yeah, that's just ... ow.

I'm really glad that she cares -- that she wanted it done right, and is willing to be blunt about what Hollywood did wrong.

Thank you for the cover links -- pretty! And I *do* see what you mean; when the artists get that sort of thing right (or just put something on the cover other than Random Blond White Person No. 6) it's noticable. Which is a sad commentary on how rare it is.

By the way -- along these lines, have you looked really closely at the Lies of Locke Lamora cover? Because I did, when I was skimming for examples for this post, and while it's hard to see all the details on the paperback version, Locke on the cover is ... well, I'm not precisely sure if they were going for "generic not white" or "Mediterranean/Middle Eastern" with him -- given the nature of the book, I'm thinking the latter -- but with his dark skin, straight black hair and high cheekbones, he is most certainly NOT depicted as a northern European.

In addition to everything else, it is confusing! I like it when the cover artist's version of the character matches closely with the one in my head and/or the one depicted in the book -- it gives me a nice visual when I'm reading. It's dissonant when the two don't match up.

But I will say that there's a key difference between a written/drawn series and a live-action series; notably being that you have to find a convincing actor. No, a good actor.

No, the best damn actor you can find for that part.

Alas, I too am a little tired of the "best actor for the part" argument for many of the same reasons that others have pointed out as well as the way it is sometimes used to shut down conversations about diversity on both the small and big screens.

One of the things that happens, at least here in the US, is the characters get "whitewashed" in order to make things more palatable or relatable for white audiences. Some producers will own up to it, others will not unless people start bringing up the source material - which is what happened with the Earthsea adaptation and more recently, the movie "21". The real-life characters that the book was based on were Asian. When the movie hit screens, they were made white. That's not about acting ability.

Um. And I just googled for the cover and, yeah, wow. From your description of the main character, I definitely see what you mean.

You want all of LeGuin's (and other people's) reactions to "Earthsea", hop over to her website (http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Index-EarthseaMiniseries.html) and read on. I love that LeGuin is so clear as well as righteously cranky.

Oooh, now you've go me wanting to go dig out my old Elfquest compendiums again... ;)

Now, I came to the series by way of the late-80s Donning/Starblaze color compilations, rather than the single issue comics, so I can't speak to the original cover art directly. But just going from the drastic shift in the art style and coloring between Book 1 and Book 2, I have to wonder if some of the inconsistency might have been a technical issue. (Umm, this being back when the whole series was four books, I think the current reprints are splitting them up into smaller volumes? but I digress) The coloring in the first volume -- not just characters, but clothes, landscapes, etc, has more of a blotchy, hand-painted sort of watercolor feel. I don't think it's a matter of print quality as this was whent he books were all put out by the same publisher, same paper quality, etc.; the style changes seemed to be down to however the coloring was done on the originals. (A switch from hand-coloring to computer, perhaps?) From Book 2 onward, the coloring was drastically different -- flatter, more solid, without that grainy painted look. Skin colors are stable from page to page and book to book. But back in Book 1, you'd see noticeable inconsistencies almost on a page-by-page basis; it was most easy to see on the darker-skinned Sun Folk, but look closely and you'd see it on clothes, backgrounds, and even the Wolfriders.

Which isn't to say that there may have been unconscious lightening going on too, of course -- particularly in the color covers, where she was working in color from scratch instead of adding color to finished black-and-white art. But the way the coloring and the art style sort of stabilizes around Book 2 does make me wonder if some of it was down to working out issues with her technique.

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.

I've mostly been a Vertigo/indy/manga girl myself, so I can't vouch for that directly, but I have definitely seen folks complaining about the whitening of characters recently; I'll try to see if I can track down the posts where I've most recently seen griping about the trend.

It's especially bad since part of the plot is that Zanja is from a diffferent tribe and sort of there as an ambassador and the other characters sometimes notice that her skin is much darker than what they are used to, iirc. Similarly for her hairstyle. She generally stands out. So it was particularly jarring, because I naturally thought the person on the cover must be someone of those other people, but nobody fit.

Thank you very much for the link! I've seen some of these links before, but not all together in one place.

(Full disclosure: "glacierdust" in the Pam Noles link is me. Or rather, *was* me, two years ago.)

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IBARW and whitewashing on genre book covers

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