Survival of the Dumbest 3

A column of ideas we should not adopt, for our national sanity.

Whitewashing - The Second Time
Try to judge the protagonist's race based on this cover for Liar. African-American likely wasn't your first instinct, yet that's the real answer for Justine Larbalestier's heroine. The problem, as is evident, is that the cover Bloomsbury first printed last summer was faithful to the title of book but not to its racial integrity. To play devil's advocate: there are light-skinned black women, and the model to your left could very well be one.

But we're talking about marketing a novel. The cover is the only image, the only "logo" or representation most see of a book. If a girl's face is our only visual, it should be spelled out so that we don't have to question or second-guess it. The karmic touch is how shrouded the girl is, as if she's hiding something beneath her hair; and beneath the cover, readers might be surprised to learn about the (forgive the expression) white elephant in the room. It's not as if, in the digital age, nobody would notice the disjunction and set off blogging about it.

Fine. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice?

Bloomsbury just retracted their cover to Magic Under Glass. Jaclyn Dolamore has also written a novel with an African-American girl as the lead, but you'd have no idea from the cover. From my view, this one is even more deceptive in appearance than the first. Clearly it's not a metaphorical image or even a complex intellectual deconstruction of race: it's just bad marketing. And why would Bloomsbury repeat their blatantly un-PC mistake six months later?

On one hand, why waste space criticizing a cover that screams "Harlequin bodice ripper"? But on the other, this can't be a mistake. The marketing staff at the publisher must have known they were intentionally misrepresenting the book. Did they hold a conversation in which it was decided that white women are more market-friendly? Oprah and Tyler Perry would disagree.

We've all seen misleading movie trailers. Book jacket synopses that barely allude to the plot. But a cover is part of the reading experience: a marketing poster but also genuine iconography for a work's themes or characters. Even beyond racial sensitivity, to think the readers won't notice the incongruity reeks more of smoke and mirrors than magic.