Smugglers’ Stash and News

Carolin

I was totally disgusted when I found out about this.

After only being able to reproduce with each other for hundreds of years, the people on the ship became a mono ethnic race. It’s a mix between black and white. You can see the description in the link you guys posted. And it fits perfectly with the ARC picture.

A HUGE plot point of the book is that Amy is completely and utterly different to everyone on the ship, because she is white and has red hair. Because she is different to all of them, she as a white person is shunned.

I finished the book this week and I absolutely loved it for its eye-opening way of looking at differences. Sadly the cover doesn’t represent the contents.

Jennifer @ An Abundance of Books

I had just assumed that the cover had been photoshopped, as gravity had not been friendly to the male model in that position. It could also be the strong lighting washing out the model (as in White Cat).

I will agree that the male model looks caucasian (both versions), but I don’t think Elder’s ethnicity is meant to be easily discernible one way or the other. As I understood it, the citizens of the Godspeed weren’t a mix of “black and white”, but so ethnically mixed over the centuries that Amy wasn’t sure what his race was.

From p. 86 of the ARC:
“I’m not sure what race he is – not black, but not white; neither Hispanic nor Asian. It’s a nice color, though – dark in a creamy sort of way that compliments his almost-black hair. The high cut of his cheekbones and the strong curve of his forehead make him look instantly trustworthy…”

I would be interested in seeing what Beth Revis says.

Jennifer (An Abundance of Books)

Animejune

I’m sorry, but put me in the “I don’t notice any change in race” camp. The face is practcally in silhouette and frankly I don’t see how this is meant to be “obviously” white. I believe white washing is a real problem but jumping to little editorial changes and making mountains out of mole hills isn’t helping anybody.

Sean Wills

To those people who don’t think this is an example of whitewashing: which part of Phoebe’s analysis in the Interrobangs post do you disagree with?

Also, in reply to #6, I seriously doubt the model was photographed ‘upside down’, in the same position he was meant to be in on the cover. I assumed they’d just photograph him standing up and then turn the image 90 degrees.

bram

Its possible, but I think we should be careful of identifying a specific set of facial characteristics as belonging uniquely to ‘mixed race’ people (and by that I’m sure you mean mixed as in black/white as there are a plethora of different combinations). When we start saying ‘this is what a black/black-white person looks like’ then we start to fall down the slippery slope towards essentialism which, in terms of equal and fair discourse, sometimes does more harm than good.

For example, I know very few dark-skinned men who look like that, but it seems we’re making the judgement that he is dark-skinned because his cheeks and lips are bigger than the one on the right. Can you see why I might find this a little problematic? Although if those features are truly meant to clue us into his ‘non-whiteness’, I think it’s also the fault of the publishers for using that photo to prey on our prejudgements on what ‘mixed race’ people ‘should look like’ rather than actually clearly showing him as mixed race or clearly showing him having dark skin (which the lighting of the book strategically makes difficult).

Anyway, this specific issue I think goes deeper than just a case of a before and after whitewashing. I’d say the before itself, including our own judgments on what black people do and do not look like, need to be re-examined. But I do think that the publishing industry on a whole largely fails at diversity on book covers, and in books in general. LARGELY fails. A lot of editors won’t fess up to it either, and a lot of publishers too, which really just annoys the shit out of me, but I hope that one day they get their heads out of their arses, stop making excuses for themselves and stop painting the world white, because really, it ISN’T thank you very much.

Sean Wills

#15: Uh…okay, I’m not really sure how you can think that looks like two women, but I’ll go with it.

It definitely does matter what ethnicity the original model is. If the publisher saw that image and thought ‘We can’t/shouldn’t have a a non-white person on the cover of this book’, then that’s a major problem. Even if nobody picked up on it and it was only obvious to the person designing the cover, that would still be a problem.

Kai Charles

I was just going to write about this! Honestly I couldn’t 100% tell the race of the mail character some edges of the female characters hair so I knew she was white. I enjoyed the book and the cover I thunk it would have been great to maybe have the races of the characters clearly shown since Beth made the characters this way

janicu

And now I’m back from reading the link to the blog post above. It’s creepy that they changed someone’s race via photoshop. I wouldn’t have realized though or thought it was white washing because I didn’t see the original cover and like I said above, I didn’t have a real image in my mind of what Elder’s features looked like.

Sylvia Sybil

For everyone who’s saying that the original model was just fat/ugly and for everyone who’s saying this is too little to bother with, I have a blog post explaining why this is a big deal.

Courtney Milan

Now that I’ve read the book, which by the way is amazing, what upsets me about this cover is that when told the protagonist is Not White, they reached for a stock photo of a black man.

Which Elder clearly is not.

He’s brown, yes–a combination of a lot of races from Asian to black to white–but he’s not black. There’s even a point in the book when he does see a black woman, and he thinks to himself that she looks different: darker skin, kinky hair.

HELLO. There are, like, billions of people in this world who are neither black nor white. Some of them even have more than one race! Setting aside for now the problematic photoshopping (and I do that only because others have talked about the troubling implications), the choice of stock implies that all people of color can be lumped into one monolithic group. There’s White, and there’s Other.

Given the undertones of the book celebrating difference, this makes me want to weep.

Emily

My two cents on the Across the Universe cover: I couldn’t even tell that one of the characters featured on the cover was supposed to be black until I read a review of the book. That, in itself, shows that the cover is whitewashed more than the cosmetic changes made ever could.

Phoebe North

I wasn’t going to respond any more, but–good grief, indeed. Angelique, would a picture of me taken two months ago with my ARC copy convince you? I actually received two of these ARCs in the mail, and Beth Revis announced it as the initial cover on her blog, and it wasn’t exactly a huge secret.

I don’t see what good it would do me to make this up, frankly.

Lop

This whole thing is pretty confusing. The point is we’re arguing over whitewashing a black person who represents a character of a different race (monoethnic). So the black model should not have actually been used on the cover to begin with, and now he’s been ‘slimmed’ to look less black.

But is that a case of whitewashing or a case of making the model look more ‘monoethnic’ — which would obviously require him to look less black? I’m not sure if that’s whitewashing, to be honest. That new ‘slimmed’ model up there doesn’t look white to me either — he looks like a mixed-race boy…which is the point.

There’s two routes here. One is that its plain old whitewashing and kind of racist. The other one is that it’s just a correction, because the model really is too distinctly of one race to represent the character well. I guess it’s all about the intention of the editor, and I guess we’ll probably never find out, eh?

I’m going down the less cynical route because it does my head in to think otherwise. I think it’s a correction, simply because the new picture is not one of a white boy. It’s, uhh, mixedracewashing or something… 😕

Elie

Wow, I love seeing people get passionate about their books!

I agree with most, that Elder is not supposed to be what most of us consider to be Black. He is a blend of every race known to us. This book takes place hundreds and hundreds of years from today. I mean what if we mixed everyone, what would they look like. I don’t think this is a clear cut case of whitewashing due to the characters intended ethnicity.

Will Entrekin

I saw this at another blog (Raych’s). I didn’t see the two male faces side by side, and couldn’t detect a discernible difference between the two.

What about the female faces? Did her greytone change from one to the next?

It looks like a change to increase contrast against the new nebular background. That’d be my guess.

Alethea

Being a brown person and currently reading ATU, I have to say I’m not offended by the cover change! The character Elder is specifically described by the other MC, Amy, as looking neither black nor Asian nor Hispanic etc…. the whole point of the *lack* of difference between the inhabitants of Godspeed is that they have been blended genetically and exhibit traits of many races at once. The romance isn’t interracial–Elder is multi-racial!!

Elder has dark brown skin, almond eyes, brown/almost black hair… possibly an Irish accent? LOL. As a brown person looking at the first (African-American looking) sample, I can recognize facial cues that tell me that the model is probably black; yet in the character described in the book we are supposed to see a little bit of ourselves, no matter what race the reader. The second one (that made it to the final cover) is more ambiguous–could be black, brown, etc.–and I think it better expresses how mixed in race Elder is.

So I say nay on whitewashing! This is nowhere near as blatant as the Liar or Magic Under Glass mistakes.