If Tolkien Were Black - By Laura Miller (salon.com)

Looking at the most visible exemplars of epic fantasy — from J.R.R. Tolkien to such bestselling authors as George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan — a casual observer might assume that big, continent-spanning sagas with magic in them are always set in some imaginary variation on Medieval Britain. There may be swords and talismans of power and wizards and the occasional dragon, but there often aren’t any black- or brown-skinned people, and those who do appear are decidedly peripheral; in “The Lord of the Rings,” they all seem to work for the bad guys.


Our hypothetical casual observer might therefore also conclude that epic fantasy — one of today’s most popular genres — would hold little interest for African-American readers and even less for African-American writers. But that observer would be dead wrong. One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy is N.K. Jemisin, whose debut novel, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms,” won the Locus Award for best first novel and nominations for seemingly every other speculative fiction prize under the sun. Another is David Anthony Durham, whose Acacia Trilogy has landed on countless best-of lists. Both authors recently published the concluding books in their trilogies.

Although they came to the genre from different paths, both Jemisin and Durham have used it to wrench historical and cultural themes out of their familiar settings and hold them up in a different light. “I never felt that fantasy needed to be an escape from reality,” Durham told me. “I wanted it to be a different sort of engagement with reality, and one that benefits from having magic and mayhem in it as well.”

In Durham’s trilogy, four royal siblings are deposed and then fight their way back to the throne in an empire presided over by the island city of Acacia. Their dynasty’s power resides in a Faustian bargain made with a league of maritime merchants: the League supplies a rabble-soothing drug in exchange for a quota of the empire’s children, who are sent off across the sea to meet an unknown fate. As promised, “Acacia” is a sweeping yarn filled with adventure, intrigue, sorcery and battles.

“There’s a little bit of the Atlantic slave trade in there, and there’s a bit of the Opium Wars and quite a bit of Halliburton,” Durham said. When set in the real world, such topics come “weighted with particular agendas and political orientations.” Readers often approach them with established opinions — or are so convinced they already know what the author is going to say that they never bother to approach them at all. When similar themes arise in an imaginary world, said Durham, “I have some readers who are quite liberal and some that are more conservative than I am, but they still engage with the book that I wrote, with all the components that are at play in it, in a way that I think they wouldn’t if they perceived me to have a political agenda right from the start.”

While Durham came to writing epic fantasy after publishing two literary novels (he has an MFA from the University of Maryland) and a historical novel about Hannibal’s march on ancient Rome, Jemisin has been a self-identified “black geek” since childhood. She started out reading science fiction, deeming fantasy to be insufficiently “real,” a notion she now considers “bizarre.” Furthermore, “I was reading almost exclusively male writers.” Her youthful attempts at writing her own stories hit a snag when her father prompted her to create a black female character, and she found she couldn’t do it. “I really didn’t know how to write from the female perspective, even though I was female.” An active search for more innovative science fiction led her to the work of Octavia Butler, “and my consciousness was utterly changed.”

Perhaps because the notion of envisioning a different future is baked into the form, science fiction is known for fostering such groundbreaking black authors as Butler and Samuel Delany. (Although, Jemisin pointed out, the first book she read by Butler featured no author photo and a cover illustration of white women, a practice known as “whitewashing.”) Much of epic fantasy — usually set in a preindustrial world — is more conservative. For example, the genre’s founding author, Tolkien, expressed a keen nostalgia for Anglo-Saxon rural life in the feudal past.

Still, some authors have tried to expand the genre’s borders. Both Jemisin and Durham cite Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books as an important influence. Le Guin, the daughter of a pioneering anthropologist, set her young-adult series in an archipelago of islands, and based its culture and religion on Asian and Native American models. Her primary characters in those novels were people of color.

Nevertheless, when Jemisin decided to write her own epic fantasy in grad school, she found herself abiding by some of the genre’s most shopworn conventions. Her main character was a man. “I was thinking it had to have a quest in it, with a MacGuffin of Power being brought to a Place of Significance,” she said. The book didn’t quite work, so she set it aside, and when she returned to it a few years later, she decided to start over. She made the main character a woman and, in an even more marked departure from the norm, she decided to have that character narrate the book in the first person. “I knew that what I was writing was inherently defiant of the tropes of epic fantasy,” Jemisin said, “and I wasn’t sure it would be accepted.”

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“There were an amazing number of pressures trying to shape me when I was a child. There are for everyone — we’ve all got pressures. But to grow up Black in America at this point in history is to be placed under a particular and intense set of pressures attempting to shape who we are. It’s been an interesting experience, and not necessarily one I’d recommend.

I feel we all develop a shell or a spine to help us deal with these pressures. Martial arts helped me develop a spine, something that supported me from within. Blacks in America are outnumbered 10 to 1. When I was growing up where I did, in South Central Los Angeles, there was a war going on. There were no referees, and I was on the losing side of the conflict. I was being told I was nothing, in a thousand ways, every day. I had to look inside myself and find answers to the questions “Who am I? What am I?"

—	Steven Barnes, from an interview with Strange Horizons, 2002.

It Matters If You’re Black or White: The Racism of YA Book Covers by Annie Schutte

Most of the time, I love young adult literature and am proud to be a YA librarian. But there’s usually a moment once a month when I feel sick, tired, and embarrassed to be working with YA books for a living — and that’s when I flip through my stack of review journals and see a menagerie of gorgeous white girls staring back at me from the covers of upcoming releases.
If a YA book features a white, female protagonist (and this accounts for a not insignificant portion of YA released each year), it seems inevitable that the book cover will display an idealized and airbrushed masterpiece of her on the cover. And when a YA book actually does have a protagonist of color, too often one of three things seems to happen:

1. The cover is “whitewashed” and shows a Caucasian model instead of a person of color;
2. The cover depicts someone whose race seems purposefully ambiguous or difficult to discern; or
3. The character is shown in silhouette

These forms of racism on the part of publishers are unacceptable. And the fact that it is so rampant within the young adult publishing industry seems particularly despicable. The first step toward change is awareness, and so below I’ve tried to pull together a collection of examples of these forms of subtle and not-so-subtle racism. If you have other examples, please share them in the comments.

Whitewashing

Whitewashing happens when a publishing company represents a non-white character on the cover of a book with a white representation. This has been going on for decades — probably centuries — and seems to show no signs of letting up. There have been a couple widely publicized examples of this (Liar by Justine Larbalestier and Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolomore), which have forced publishers to re-release the covers with more accurate character depictions. Yet this public shaming hasn’t stopped it as a widespread industry practice.

*Spoiler Alert* You’d never know it looking at these covers, but the Darkness Rising trilogy actually features a 100% Native American protagonist named Maya. And the fact that she is Native American isn’t just a sidebar. It’s critical to the story: Maya was basically created in a lab by an evil corporation trying to resurrect an ancient type of Native-American super humans who can morph into mountain lions. The face that she’s Native American is mentioned dozens, if not hundreds of times in these books.

There may not be any explicit discussions of race in this book — especially since it takes place in a version of our world where protagonist Malora is the last living human and roams around with a band of horses and later centaurs. But the story is explicitly set in Africa, and Malora is repeatedly described a shaving dark skin … not that you’d know if from the cover.

This combination dystopia and vampire romance features Allison Sekemoto, who is not an attractive, red-eyed, white girl as you might guess from the cover, but rather an attractive, red-eyed, Asian girl. If the Japanese last name isn’t enough to convince you, consider snippets of dialogue such as this one: “My reflection stared back at me, a dirty-faced girl with straight black hair and ‘squinty eyes,’ as Rat put it.”

This is one of the most widely publicized incidents of whitewashing. The book follows Micah, a compulsive liar, who gets caught in a tight web of her own making after her boyfriend dies under suspicious circumstances. Micah is black and is described a wearing her hair naturally. The advanced readers’s copy was released with the cover on the left, but it was officially printed with the cover on the right after public outcry.

Bloomsbury strikes again in another high publicized cover controversy that it also had to change for the reprint. Magic Under Glass is about Nimira, a dance-hall performer who is plucked out of obscurity by a sorcerer to sing with a piano-playing automaton. Nimira is described as having “dark skin” and being from the “far East.” The cover on the left is the original cover, which clearly depicts a Caucasian girl. The cover on the right is the reprint.

This series follows four genius children who come together to solve mysterious and creative tasks. Each of the three covers in the main series initially featured four children who match each of the four children in the books — except for one detail. The character Sticky Washington is described in the books as having “light brown skin,” but has Caucasian-white skin on the covers. The publisher has since re-released all of the books with this corrected.

Cassel comes from a family of famous “curse workers” who can exert power over people with the touch of their hands (hence the gloves). Cassel’s race is purposely ambiguous in this book. He has family members who are described as having dark skin, and different characters in the book make mention of his unclear ethnicity. The original book galleys depicted an even whiter version of Cassel on the cover (if that’s possible), but he still looks pretty darn Caucasian to me.

Ursula K. LeGuin has been vocal about how her characters are depicted on book covers for decades, yet publisher after publisher has disregarded her text. The classic fantasy book follows Ged as he rises in power as a sorcerer. Ged is described in the book as having red-brown skin, yet most of the covers depict him as white, and the movie version is just as bad.

The advance reading copy (right) here is much worse than the final version (left), but they both give you the distinct impression that you have a book about an attractive white female here. The reality is that Elisa is overweight, brown skinned (possibly Hispanic or Arab), and more than a little awkward. She’s also the “Godstone,” or chosen one, which makes her all the more self conscious about what she sees as her physical shortcomings. The sequel, The Crown of Embers, falls into the same trap, showing the silhouette of a very white female in the gem on the cover.

This futuristic retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion changes a lot, including the leading lady’s ethnic makeup. Elliot North is a member of the “Luddite nobility” and is described as having brown skin, dark hair, and almond-shaped eyes. Seen through the whitewashed cover filter, though, you would think she’s a willowy white girl with brown hair and pale skin.

**Note: Author Diana Peterfreund has responded to this post on her own blog, stating that the Elliot character is meant to be racially ambiguous and that she believes the cover does accurately reflect the character in her book. Read her response here: “Whitewashing Covers, part eleventy, and Elliot’s ethnicity”

What you’re seeing here are two very different depictions of protagonist Ai Ling. The one on the left is the hardcover edition, which highlights her ethnicity. The one on the right is the paperback edition, which strangely removed all cultural markers and makes her appear more like a white, goth girl than a powerful and beautiful Asian woman.

These two books pair to make a historical/mythological retelling of Egyptian princess Nefertiti’s story. I can only assume that the cover model is supposed to be depicting the Egyptian princess, but it looks more like a Caucasian woman dressing up as a sexy Cleopatra for Halloween.

Ambiguous ethnicity

One step down from whitewashing a cover is obscuring the character’s racial identity on a cover. It often seems like white characters are spotlighted front and center on a book cover, while non-white characters are hidden in shadow, have their face obscured, or are distorted in some other way that allows people to assume that the character is white. There are countless examples of this, but here are a few that came to mind.

This historical fiction book takes place in the Gila River internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. The baseball players are all Japanese Americans, but it’s a bit hard to tell that between the sunset-obscured lighting and catcher’s mask.

This fantasy novel clearly describes protagonist Khemri as having brown skin and black eyes, but with the swirling green lights on this cover and the partially-obscured face on other covers, it’s pretty difficult to tell. My best guess is that the publisher used a Causasian model for all of the covers.

The female protagonist in this series is white, but the leading male is a crew member who, like all crew members, is a racially ambiguous mix that melds all ethnicities together. If you look closely, his features look non-white, but the shadow is so intense that there’s no way to really tell.

In this survival story, Fisher is told that one of his advantages is that his skin has been made darkly pigmented to help lessen the effects of sun exposure. The weird lighting and back view make it pretty hard to tell, but his skin looks pretty light to me.

The intense yellow lighting and weird angle here make is so that you can’t make out very much about the main character at all, but page one informs you that he’s a famous African wizard.

San Lee is an adopted Asian kid who tells everyone that he’s a zen master in order to try to make friends and impress a girl he likes. But between the hand stand and weird angle, he could be an awkward, socks-and-sandals-wearing kid of pretty much any ethnicity.

Silhouetting

Don’t misunderstand me here. I think using silhouettes instead of realistic depictions on a cover is graphically beautiful and a great way of not ruining the readers’ personal impressions of what a character should look like. But what I cannot stomach is that the technique seems to be overwhelming used for books with non-white protagonists. Here are some examples from books released during the past year.

Book covers — not to mention the books being published — need to represent the diversity of people actually reading books. As a librarian, I actively seek out stories that feature protagonists of all races, ethnicities, sexualities, and backgrounds. But looking at the shelves, you can barely tell sometimes because the books featuring non-white characters fade into the background behind the eye catching, white faces that stare at you from so many covers. It’s time for publishing companies to stop whitewashing their covers.
*Correction: This post originally stated that the book Liar was “first published” with a white model on the cover, when in fact the advance reader’s copy was printed with that cover; it was never officially published.
– Annie Schutte, currently reading The Returning by Christine Hinwood

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Sci-Fi Fantasy Diversity Quotes

Do not tell me, or the people like me who have grown up hearing Arabic around them, or singing in Swahili, or dreaming in Bengali—but reading only (or even mostly) in English (or French, or Dutch)—that this colonial rape of our language has not infected our ability to narrate, has not crippled our imagination. When I was in class 7, our English teacher gave us the rare creative writing assignment, and three of my classmates wrote adventure stories about characters named Julian and Peggy and Tom. Do not tell me that this cultural fracture does not affect the odds required to produce enough healthy imaginations that can chrysalis into writers.

You know other suffering, yes. But it’s not a contest. It’s not a ‘my pain is bigger than your pain’ debate. The question is whether you have experienced a particular thing — whether, in a culture of institutionalized racism, you have walked down the street in a brown or yellow or red or black skin, and dealt with the consequences therein. That’s all. Because while there’s a damn good chance that you’ve suffered more than me (I’ve led a relatively sheltered life for a PoC, insulated by being part of the model minority, and by my family’s upper-middle-class status), that’s still not the point. The point has to do with specific experience.

Mary Anne Mohanraj

Why My Protags Aren’t White" By Justine Larbalestier

I’ve been asked a few times why none of my protags are white given that I am white. (So far that question has only come from white people.) I thought I’d answer the question at length so next time I get that particular email I can direct them here.

I don’t remember deciding that Reason, the protagonist of the Magic or Madness trilogy, would have a white Australian mother and an Indigenous Australian father. I don’t remember deciding that Tom would be white Australian or Jay-Tee Hispanic USian. But I made a conscious decision that none of the characters in How To Ditch Your Fairy would be white and that Liarwould have a mixed race cast. Why?

Because a young Hispanic girl I met at a signing thanked me for writing an Hispanic character. Because when I did an appearance in Queens the entirely black and Hispanic teenage audience responded so warmly to my book with two non-white main characters. Because teens, both here and in Australia, have written thanking me for writing characters they could relate to. “Most books are so white,” one girl wrote me.

Because no white teen has ever complained about their lack of representation in those books. Or asked me why Reason and Jay-Tee aren’t white. They read and enjoyed the trilogy anyway. Despite the acres and acres of white books available to them.

Because I don’t live in an all-white world. Why on earth would I write books that are?

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