folklorefanatic

Usually, this blog is about unpleasant realities that can seem insurmountable. I think the following news proves that just talking about race is enough to affect an entire industry. Corporations can and will do the right thing if enough people put up a fuss and speak out.

Bloomsbury USA is going to change the cover of its leading Young Adult fiction title this fall, Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. It was another case of whitewashing, where the white girl on the cover was supposed to represent the biracial black protagonist in the story. Many bloggers and readers expressed dismay at the misrepresentation of the main character and how the cover fed into the racist trend of sidelining both stories about people of color and authors of color (Larbalestier is white, but the conversation outgrew this one single instance), and how children of color so rarely find protagonists who look like they do on the covers of the books they are encouraged to buy. Justine took a professional risk and publicly criticized the decision to put a stock photo of a white girl on the book over her protests.

For those of you not aware, authors rarely have any say whatsoever in what the cover art for their work looks like when they are published at an old-school, non-print-on-demand publisher, the only kind of  publisher from which most books stores are willing to buy. If you want your print books to reach a large audience, you have to be willing to give up most of your creative control over everything: the audience to which the book is marketed, the language and vocabulary used in the story, the cover art, the marketing pitch, the blurb, etc. Having a contract not only with an agent but with a publisher with the clout of Bloomsbury is a big deal. Justine was brave enough to talk honestly on the Internet about a subject that could have cost her professional relationships vital to her career. She believed the risk was worth the potential cost to herself, to young readers, especially children of color if she did not. I agree with her.

It took less than two weeks of the story circulating between the blogs and publishing news media outlets for Bloomsbury to change its mind and order all of the old covers to be scrapped, conduct a photo shoot, and order new covers for the book. For a large print run like 100,000 copies, that must have cost them a significant amount of money, but the publishers decided to do it any way. The motivations behind doing this may not be as idealistic as Justine’s, and the new cover girl doesn’t actually have ‘nappy’ hair, but it is a vast, VAST improvement over the original cover.

Normally, I don’t approve of giving people ‘cookies’ for doing the right thing. But the reviews of Justine’s book make it sound fantastic, and I want this book to succeed beyond Bloomsbury’s expectations. Furthermore, Justine has recommended two authors of color who deserve as many accolades for their talents: Coe Booth, who has written Kendra, a coming-of-age story about a young mother and her teenage daughter afraid of repeating the past, and M. Sindy Felin’s Touching Snow.

Provided that this new face graces Liar when it hits the bookshelves in October, I will be one of the first to buy several copies.

Originally published at The Multiracial Muse. You can comment here or there.

I am now working on the Obama campaign every single day. I’ve been making phone calls and knocking on people’s doors trying to convince them to vote for Obama since the week of the Democratic National Convention at the end of August. Lots of our volunteers here in PA have become complacent, thinking that victory is a sure thing, which is absolutely not true, and the few of us hardcore workers have been trying to pick up the slack.

I have a commission-based job to plan out after the election, a NaNoWriMo novel to outline, a request from an editor for a short story partial, and re-enrollment at Harvard (my last chance) for next spring to worry about. I finished my voice acting projects earlier in the month, but more work is coming. It is so hard to keep up with the several blogs on which I’m supposed to be working, much less my RSS feeds to which I am normally addicted. There is never enough time as it is without the 2008 Election, and now that we’re down to the wire, everything is surreal, and I’m just trying to capture and catalogue it privately for future reflection as best I can.

I think the racists have intimidated a lot of our earlier canvassers who were people of color - everyone is so brave to put up with some of the crap people hurl at you. Just the other day, my boss’s white mom took a black woman out canvassing with her for the woman’s first canvas. The first house they approached, a woman looked out the window, saw the two of them, and screamed that if they didn’t get off her property in ten seconds, she was going to call the police and Thre Would Be Trouble. No Obama pins, no posters, no visible campaign materials. It was seeing a black woman on her doorstep that made her freak out.

The crap that ignorant (usually white) people will say to you when they think you’re white is really, really scary.

Als, the word socialist is bandied about a lot here. I don’t think it means what conservatives think it means. Libraries are socialist. The Post office is socialist. The Veteran’s Administration, Social Security, Medicare and the Wall Street bailout are socialist programs. Obama? Not so much.

Interesting links for the week:

· http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008 (where the candidates fall on a political spectrum - you’ll probably be surpised)
· http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-western-pennsylvania.html (I can say without a doubt that the shocking examples of PA political behavior do not surpise me. At all.)

Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.