Christian Leftist

Whitewashing of cover art for books about people of color has been a problem for a long, long time, going back to Uncle Remus and the minstrelface that the publishers thought would sell more copies.

Now Justine Larbalestier, YA author of How to Ditch Your Fairy, has showed bravery is saying what her readers allowed her to say by expressing themselves vociferously: that she actually hates the current cover of her upcoming book, Liar. The protagonist is biracial but looks black, and yet the cover shows a white girl with fair, straight hair.

Larbalestier doesn’t have a clause in her contract giving her final approval of the cover art, and she strongly objected to the cover, to no avail. The hard truth is that the more rights you ask for in your contracts, the less llikely you are to find a commercially advantageous book deal. Authors usually have little to NO say over the art design for their books. The -isms present in the publishing industry are as bad as the music industry’s ever were, only the people in power are unable to recognize their perpetuation of these oppressions because they consider themselves to be ‘liberal.’

Justine expresses the cold facts eloquently:

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?

The notion that ‘black books’ don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them4 Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with ‘white covers.’

When are clueless white people going to get it? Those of us under 35? We don’t want incremental change that only manifests itself on our deathbeds. We’re sick and tired of excuses for this kind of behavior. White are the minority on this planet. In a few years, they will be the minority among people under 25. By 2050, maybe much sooner, they will be the minority in the United States. It’s time to move past colonialist attitudes and shove the ignorant portions of the populace into the 21st century, whether it makes them uncomfortable or not.

Bloomsbury wants proof that their racist sales strategies are going to cost them money if they don’t change? Fine. I’m going to buy the Australian version of the book. I encourage you to help the author and protext simultaneously by doing the same, and make sure to tell Bloomsbury why you’re doing it.

Bloomsbury Publishing
Distributed by Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

marketing: marketing@bloomsburyusa.com
publicity: publicity.adult@bloomsburyusa.com

F: (212) 780-0115 or (212) 982-2837

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Actually, I loved CBS’s montage of the Inauguration Day as well, but they cut off Aretha Franklin’s last note on that one for Katie Couric to say goodnight. WTH? Do it like Brian did, only do a longer version, people. Hello!

I tried to watch and tape all three of the major network’s evening news broadcasts yesterday. I think the best overall was NBC’s, which makes me angry because I only taped half of ABC’s and all of CBS’s. Once again. I picked the wrong network to record. D’oh. Anyway, here’s a clip from an amazing day.

Obama just won the presidential election.

I think I’m crying, but it’s all kind of a blur at this point, as I’m a bit tipsy, exhausted and disbelieving all at once. I just can’t believe it.

Our national nightmare is finally over. Now comes the dawn.

At long last, we are ready to meet it.

You’d think that any politician convicted of seven criminal felony charges and facing significant jail time, possibly for the rest of his natural life, would quit while he was behind and call it a day.

But this is not just any old politician. This isn’t even any old senator.

Oh no. This is Senator Ted Stevens of the “Alaska Is Always First!” persuasion we’re talking about, and Sen. Stevens is the kind of guy who would rise from the dead just so he could shoot at noisy neighborhood kids to scare them off his lawn.

Now that the longest-serving Republican senator ever is a seven-time convicted felon, he’s decided not only to appeal the conviction, on which he has several legitimate reasons to do so, he’s also refusing to drop out of his senate race to re-election.

Before the conviction announcement by the jury yesterday, Stevens was in a virtual dead heat with Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich last week according to a poll done there. It’s unclear whether Sen. Stevens will win re-election, considering he is only the fifth U.S. Senator to ever be convicted of a felony while in office.

The verdict was a huge blow to Stevens, who had pushed through his lawyers for a speedy trial (and what he hoped was a speedy acquittal) before Election Day. Now, with seven days left before November 4th, there isn’t enough time to have an appeal approved before voters go to the polls to decide his fate.

Just this past Sunday, Stevens’s attorneys were expressing impatience and frustration at the dismissal and replacement of one juror with an alternate after the juror’s mother died and she cut off contact with the judge. They were concerned that the verdict would not arrive soon enough. With the results the opposite of what Stevens’s team had wanted, one can assume they are regretting the decision to request a speedy trial.

The real kicker? Today, the press announced that Alaska Governor and GOP Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin has disavowed his actions, Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell is too worried about losing his own seat in a re-election bid to care much, and even Arizona Senator and GOP Presidential Candidate John McCain says Stevens should resign.

You know it’s going to be a bad week when the head of your party and that party’s presidential candidate says you should call it a day and go home.

To top off the ludicrousness of the situation, Stevens probably can’t even vote for himself in the election. That’s right: Alaska law says that convicted felons cannot vote until their sentences are served and completed.

However, there’s apparently no law that says convicted felons can’t run for Congress. Irony, pinch me, please. I think my brain just left the building, and I want it back.