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

Pass on this information as you see fit. If you’re going to cut and paste the post, though, please link to me and give credit.

…is that good men do nothing. Or in this particular struggle, to stand by and watch passively as friends, neighbors and peers engage in hideous acts of moral repugnance.

Here are some McCain supporters in Lehigh, PA waiting to get into Lehigh Universty to hear him at a rally.

The transcript:

The protesters line one side of a street leading to a parking lotto the auditorium, while McCain supporters form a fast-moving line on the opposite side with many more people. A quick pan reveals a sampling of the protesters’ signs and slogans. McCain supporters shout insults at the protesters as they file past them, sometimes insulting the reporter as well.

McCain Man 01: …And one thing we don’t need is another lawyer in Washington, and that’s Barack Obama! He’s a lawyer!

McCain Man 02: (to the cameraman/reporter) I think you’re stupid. *woman grins in background*
Reporter: Why, sir?
McCain Man 02: *looks uncomfortable, as if he didn’t expect reporter to reply to his insult* Because if that guy gets elected, he hangs around with terrorists…
Reporter: Who’s [sic] the terrorists?
McCain Man 02: Obama.

McCain Man 03: Obama’s a terrorist! Don’t you know that?

McCain Man 04: Obama’s a Muslim! He’s a terrorist himself!
Reporter: Do you really believe that, sir? *pause* Do you really believe that? Do you believe Senator Obama’s a terrorist?
McCain Man 04: (to reporter) I believe he supports terrorism.

McCain Man 05: (to protestors) *flips them off* Here it is! Love it.

McCain Man 06: Commie f*ggots! Commie f*ggots…

McCain Woman 01: He’s a terrorist.

Some middle-aged woman cackles at an off-camera joke or insult. In the background, another younger women stops and shouts at the protestors.

McCain Woman 02: GO HOME!

McCain Woman 03: *points at protestors* GO HOME!

McCain Man 07: Go get a job! Go get a job!

McCain Man 08: Go get a job.

McCain Man 09: GET A JOB!

…et cetera. It gets worse. Much, much worse. It’s not the only video on YouTube, either. If you have a strong gag reflex, search for “Obama monkey.”

20 more days.

The blogosphere is doing its job quite well in reporting stories globally that otherwise might only be noticed locally. The flip side of this is that it’s incredibly difficult to keep up. Just when I think I’m going to catch up with current events, there’s a whole bunch of new and even more depressing news stories that make me want to quit the internet for good. Of course, the feeling passes and I recover, but as I become more adept at not just looking but really listening to what people are saying behind their façades, it’s more and more difficult to pick and choose what’s more important to write about in the limited time I reserve for blogging each day.

Should I report blurbs on these stories and miss the education of reading these other stories? Won’t I be a better, more educated person if I try to learn as much as possible about the issues that matter the most to me? The end result of these questions is that I do more reading than writing, and my blogs suffer for it. I’m not making money from blogging as of right now. I’m doing this because I believe in social justice and activism, that this world could be better, that we need to treat other human beings with respect and dignity, that we need to NEVER FORGET what others do in ignorance because we can learn from their and our mistakes.

I just thought I should explain why “This Week in Racism” missed a few weeks.

Without further ado, this week’s list:

• William Sanders, editor-in-chief of Helix, a sci-fi / fantasy magazine, has some major issues with Arabs and chose to express his bigotry in a rejection letter to Luke Jackson, who sent him a manuscript about a Muslim terrorist.

  No, I’m sorry but I can’t use this.

  There’s much to like. I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people - at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can - and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities.

  He also used the phrase “most of the SF magazines are very leery of publishing anything that might offend the sheet heads.” Sanders and others who rushed to his defense after Jackson posted the letter said that his words were ‘taken out of context.’ Jackson himself intimated this before deciding that the legal issues of posting rejection letters were more relevant than Sanders’s bigotry, which I find deeply flawed, but the guy is at least allowing free discussion on his blog and has a willingness to listen, which is hard to come by in cases like this. To top it all off, Sanders obviously expected to find a sympathetic ear behind the story he received because of the subject of the story, so he was acting like the sci-fi community is a white old boy’s club, despite the fact that he himself is not white.

• Ed Kuck, a member of the Pemberton Republican Club in Burlington County, PA, decided that the group’s membership numbers weren’t low enough and posted a banner on the club’s website that read, Obama loves America like O.J. loved Nicole. The local GOP head decried the dirty slogan as having “no place in Burlington County Republican politics.”
• Florida’s New Smyrna Beach Police Department’s Commander William Drossman used his government email account to send a fallacious and racist chain letter full of invented and misleading quotes about Obama to members of his all-white force. One officer saw a print-out of it and reported the incident to the local news. I especially like how WFTV 9 included both a copy of the email and a link to the Snopes article that debunks the anti-Obama letter. According to the local laws, the Commander could be fired for using his work email to distribute political material. What’s more important than if he can be fired, of course, is the fact that he should.

Polic Officer Kills Man Who Killed K-9 - The letters to the editor in the aftermath of this incident are, with I think two exceptions, positively appalling. This isn’t the first time Pittsburgh police have committed brutality against black people in the city burroughs, either.

A Pittsburgh police officer shot and killed a 19-year-old Allentown man who shot and killed a K-9 dog during a confrontation in Mount Oliver last night.

A crowd of angry onlookers, including the victim’s family, quickly gathered at the scene in the 1600 block of Arlington Avenue. Dozens of officers also arrived on the scene, some with K-9 dogs, to help keep the crowd under control.

When the Pittsbrugh Post-Gazette ran coverage of the funeral, angry (bigoted) readers wanted to know why there wasn’t more coverage of Ulf, the K-9 dog’s funeral. Someone wrote on topix.com, “Thank [the cops] for taking out the trash.” Apparently, when a 19-year old black man has a prior criminal record and has a gun, he’s no longer considered human. Because we all know that trained pets are worth more than black people!

More reactions to the shooting death of Justin Jackson

Greenwood Councilman Calls Mississippi State Senator ‘Ole N*gger’ - John Lee, one of the city’s two white Republican councilmen, circulated an email to 15 of his colleagues in which he referred to David Jordan by the racial slur, saying:

“had a long talk after the city council meeting … with David Jordan. The ole n*gger can’t understand why the black’s (sic) continue to shoot one another. I told him he needed to spend less time with the old people at the Voters League and more time with the young people about getting an education.”

One of the email recipients leaked the letter to the press. The other white Republican councilman in Greenwood, John Jennings, continues to defend Lee’s remarks.

Thanks to Jack and Jill Politics for bringing the second story to light.