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crossposted from What Tami Said Why would a young adult (YA) book about a black girl with features that reflect her African ancestry and hair that is short and natural have a young, white girl with keen features and flowing tresses on the cover? Folks around the Web (Read this great summary at Chasing Ray) are asking that question about the US release of Australian author Justine Larbalestier's latest book, Liar, a thriller about a teenage pathological liar.
The answer, according to Bloomsbury, the book's publisher, is certainly one we've heard before: Black faces don't sell, particularly dark ones framed by nappy hair. Beauty sells and black faces are not beautiful. In a post about the controversy on her Web site, Larbalestier mentions a positive review of Liar that brands Micah, the protagonist, "ugly," though there is nothing in the book that describes her as such. Apparently, it is her blackness and nappiness that offends.
The author (who, btw, is white) writes in her post about fighting for a different book cover and losing the battle. Though several images of young girls were considered, and not all of the faces were white, none actually resembled the protagonist. Larbalestier is disappointed, not just with her experience, but with the fact that this cover bait-and-switch is not uncommon:
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." Read more...
It is not just black girls whose faces are deemed inadequate, Trisha at The YA, YA, YAs points out:
My first reaction to the Liar cover controversy: That's shameful. An eye-catching cover, to be sure, but to use the picture of a white girl who blatantly does not match the narrator's description at all? So. Wrong. Even more so now that I've had a chance to read the book.My second reaction to the Liar cover controversy: Well, hell, it's not as if it's unusual for Asian-American characters to have their race obscured on book covers. Granted, not whitewashed like this, but hidden nevertheless. This might sound really callous and I sincerely don't mean to diminish the importance of the original discussion or of Bloomsbury's deplorable actions, but there you go. Read more...
I was once a young, black girl with a voracious appetite for books. I still love them and I try to instill a bit of that bibliophilia in my nieces and nephews. Books are so powerful. They can uplift, teach, entertain, save...There is a reason that books and the ability to read have historically been withheld from oppressed peoples. Books can damage, too. If I hand a copy of Liar, with its cover that implies black
