The whitewashing of black books tops this week's African-American books blogger round-up at African-American Books Examiner. Here are this week's five picks for news from blog posts related to writing or black authors.
1.) Tami at What Tami Said echoes growing outrage at Bloomsbury publishing house for whitewashing the cover of another young adult book that has a dark-skinned black character with the picture of a white girl. For the second time in less than a year, the publisher has chosen to market a book about a black character with white visuals.
As a result, the blogger at Bookshop on LiveJournal has resolved to stop buying young adult books published by Bloomsbury. This time the publisher misrepresented a debut novel, Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore.
The blogger at GAL Novelty sounded the alarm with others last week, and Kate Harding at Salon.com writes in-depth about Bloomsbury's failure to use an accurate representation of the protagonist. This past summer, BlogHer.com ran the post Race and Book Covers tackling this same issue with the same company but a different book, Liar by Justine Larbalestier. According to that post, Larbaleistier is white but she writes about black characters and explains why here. The novelist says the only people who ask her why her characters aren't white are white people. Publishers claim its easier to market books with white faces on the cover.
2.) At Reading in Color in Miss Attitude gives the book The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon a rating of five out of five. She reviewed the book in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, because it's "won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award. It has also been nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature for Youth/Teens."
Per her review, the book "is about the civil rights movement. It tells the story of Sam Childs, son of a nonviolent civil rights protester, Roland Childs (a fictional character)."
3.) Color Online, which is running a good sight-gag related to the Bloomsbury controversy, is spreading the word about the School Library Journal's Top 100 Children's Fictional Chapter Books Poll.
4.) While not a book blogger, Josh Garrick at Tripvine shares the goods on the upcoming Zora Neale Hurston festival in Eatonville, Fla, January 23 to 31. You may also read more at the festival's official website.
5.) Karen at Musings of a Novelista lists the 2010 American Library Association's ALSC (Association of Library Service to Children) media award winners and the Coretta Scott King Awards, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary
Comments
I appreciate your keeping me posted. Guess if I publish my own book I can make sure the cover looks like what I want it to. I once had a short story published in a local magazine and the photos that illustrated it were not of people of color although very appropriate to the book. When I reread the story, I realized that while I wrote the characters from my community, the Black community, I'd never described their color or race at all. So now, especially in my children's work, I explicitly describe, if I feel it's important to do so. In the case of the aforementioned publisher, this wouldn't matter at all.
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