3

Claim:

If a YA book features a white, female protagonist ..., it seems inevitable that the book cover will display an idealized and airbrushed masterpiece of her on the cover. And when a YA book actually does have a protagonist of color, too often one of three things seems to happen:

  • The cover is “whitewashed” and shows a Caucasian model instead of a person of color;
  • The cover depicts someone whose race seems purposefully ambiguous or difficult to discern; or
  • The character is shown in silhouette

...

It often seems like white characters are spotlighted front and center on a book cover, while non-white characters are hidden in shadow, have their face obscured, or are distorted in some other way that allows people to assume that the character is white.

Notability: It's one blog post of many. It's a blog post which has been mentioned on some famous social justice blogs, including Shakesville. It's a blog post which received a reply from one of the mentioned authors; that author gave her response the title "Whitwashing covers, part eleventy", indicating that this was part of a long ongoing conversation in the bloggosphere.

The blog post quoted gives many many examples, but I'm not aware of any statistical evidence that ambiguous covers are "overwhelming[ly] used for books with non-white protagonists". (To be clear, this wouldn't surprise me, in the least, but it would be nice to see some evidence.)

Community
  • 1
TRiG
  • 706
  • 7
  • 23
  • 2
    you should mention that in the Q. – user5341 Jun 07 '13 at 16:21
  • 1
    If the blogger is a YA librarian, then she's an expert and qualified to make generalizations about the range of book covers in her YA collection. Her allegations are true in specific instances (e.g. "Ursula K. LeGuin has been vocal about how her characters are depicted on book covers for decades, yet publisher after publisher has disregarded her text."). You ask for "some evidence" but statistics change: perhaps the range of book covers available now is different than it was 10 or 30 or 60 or more years ago; partly, perhaps, because of the "anti-bias" agenda of which this blog post is a part. – ChrisW Jun 08 '13 at 04:34
  • 1
    @ChrisW: We know experts make mistakes. We know the human mind has lots of unnoticed biases when it detects patterns. That is why we ask for empirical evidence rather than someone's impression. – Oddthinking Jun 08 '13 at 05:59
  • 1
    I thought I had hit a jackpot with a peer-reviewed article on this topic, [YA Literature: The Inside and Cover Story](http://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2013/04/ya-literature-the-inside-and-cover-story/). However, it looks at a grand total of three books, with no description about how they were selected. It is only anecdotal evidence to support the claim. – Oddthinking Jun 08 '13 at 06:01
  • Another [near miss](http://www.katehart.net/2012/05/uncovering-ya-covers-2011.html). – Oddthinking Jun 08 '13 at 06:03
  • 1
    Asking for "statistics" and questioning how books are sampled is IMO missing the point. The observations of people like her are based on the specific actual samples which they have: i.e., existing library collections; plus brochures of new book covers and blurbs which from book publishers give to people who buy new books. My wife took a college degree for Early Childhood Educator (ECE). Some of the ECE syllabus includes child literature, anti-bias in education, trips to book-stores, choosing from publisher's catalogs, etc. It's a well-known topic but I doubt it's a clever question. There are – ChrisW Jun 09 '13 at 17:12
  • 1
    ... some examples of the phenomenon. There will be some counter-examples. Perhaps it depends on (i.e. varies with) the publisher, and varies from country to country, as well as from time to time. – ChrisW Jun 09 '13 at 17:16
  • 2
    @ChrisW well said, in today's PC western culture, with all its 'affirmative action' and 'positive discrimination', I'd be surprised if publishers didn't find it profitable to promote books as having non-white protagonists (and risk getting sued if they don't have a majority of them). – jwenting Jun 10 '13 at 07:03
  • 3
    @jwenting. What on Earth are you talking about? On what possible basis could a publisher be sued for publishing bias in their output? – TRiG Jun 11 '13 at 22:52
  • 3
    @ChrisW: It is a legitimate form of skepticism to say "Here is one person's observations based on a collection of anecdotes. They may well be right, but we know people - even experts - make mistakes when informally looking for patterns (e.g. doctors that claim patients bleed more on a full moon.) We can point to many well-known biases. Are there any systematic reviews of the data to avoid these mistakes?" – Oddthinking Jun 12 '13 at 04:33
  • 1
    @TRiG it's very easy to scream "discrimination" when there are "not enough minorities" in a book or they are "misrepresented". The publishers of Tintin were taken to court over that, there are even attempts to get the cartoons banned in several countries, because the protagonists are all white and some of the antagonists are black, and worse blacks are in some books represented as underdeveloped (which, at the time the books were written, was standard, they are nearly a century old, and we're still talking about "developing nations", a term based on that idea, even now). – jwenting Jun 12 '13 at 05:31
  • 1
    I think this comment thread is wandering off-topic. Little of it contributes to the core of the question: i.e. is there a trend in western publishing to obscure depictions of ethnic minorities on the covers of Young Adult literature? – Ian Jun 12 '13 at 12:30
  • An analysis of YA books covers http://www.katehart.net/2012/05/uncovering-ya-covers-2011.html – nico Jun 12 '13 at 13:14
  • @jwenting. This question is explicitly about books which *do* have ethnic-minority protagonists, so I don't know what you're bleating about. – TRiG Oct 29 '13 at 16:44

0 Answers0