I've been thinking a lot lately about the general whiteness of the YA world. It started off as a casual thought about the biggest trends in young adult literature in the past few years.
- Harry Potter, for all its good points, lacks dieversity among our lead characters. The Golden Trios, the Weasleys, the Malfoys, the Lovegoods, the Longbottoms, the Diggorys -- all of them are white. We have a few token goats with Dean and Cho Chang, but they're lost in the whiteness of the Wizard world.
- The Hunger Games has characters of color - Rue, Thresh - but it's not a factor that many of the fans seem to notice. (Remember the Twitter backlash when the world found out Rue wasn't a young white girl?) But just like Harry Potter, our main characters, from Katniss to Finnick to Peeta to Gale, are white or off-white.
- Okay, so I hate Twilight and everything it has to do with it, but it's actually the best with diversity. I remember an Asian side character and all the crappily crafted Native American werewolves, and I know there's a black vampire villain in the first novel. But the biggest of the vampires are all white - the Cullens, Bella, the evil Italian vampires.
It got me to thinking - is this because white characters sell or because we sell white characters?
I don't know.
“Putting pretty white girls on all your book covers is the book equivalent of what all our fashion magazines do. An idealization of beauty that is unrealistic and dangerous to our youth. And it isn’t the right thing to do. Seeing a minority grace the cover of a YA book is like spotting the Lochness monster, you wonder if you’ve truly seen it and if you’ll ever see it again. How sad is that? To say that only pretty white girls can sell YA books is not a business model that publishers should approve of. And it’s not true. We need look no further than the gender neutral and iconic covers for the Hunger Games and Twilight series to see the truth.” - Ellen Oh
We're in this vicious cycle that white characters sell because all we're selling, for the most part, is white characters. I can count a handful of the 200 books in my to-be-read pile that I know feature a character whose ethnicity is something different than my white.
I know Julie Kagawa's The Immortal Rules features an Asian (half-Japanese, if I remember correctly) protagonist, but you can't tell that from the cover. Cindy Pon and Malinda Lo's books all feature Asian protagonists, but despite how well-written they are and how beautiful the covers are I've never seen them in the spotlight. As for non-Asian ethnicities, I can't think of any off the top of my head besides Liar, and that's a problem within itself. Not because they're not there, but because I can't remember.
If it's not on the cover, I never remember.
This bothers me. I'm not going to claim to understand the underlying racism to and offense that comes with the lack of diverse characters or the whitewashing; as a while girl, I'm what ends up on most of the colors. Perhaps it happens because they believe I am the majority of the readership in YA and will be more likely to pick something up if it looks like me?
Whoever makes those decisions would be wrong.
I should state that, for main characters, or characters in general, it's not that I'm colorblind. I just flat out don't remember what characters look like or its relevance to the story. I can remember vague description if it's important, like scars or relevant clothing. I don't remember hair or eye or skin. It's never been important to me. I prefer details like who they are as characters. (Rhiannon from The Lost Years of Merlin is a great example of this. One of my favorite characters and I don't remember anything about her appearance except that she wears a dress of leaf vines.)
But I do notice if an entire book is full of white characters, and it annoys me.
And I do notice if a non-white character is portrayed as white on the cover. I raged about The Immortal Rules cover because of it. It's just sad.
I don't care if your character is or isn't a shiny sparkly white.
I care that you have to lie about the content of the book by misleading readers about the ethnicity of your character on the cover because, by alienating a large portion of your readers, you think you'll earn more money.
And I care that you're afraid to put people who aren't a shiny sparkly white in your book because you're afraid it won't sell or that it doesn't make sense.
The world is diverse.
Shouldn't books and covers reflect that?