prejudice/discrimination

Why did Bloomsbury Press choose this cover for a YA novel about a short-haired black girl? Maybe because, according to publishers, “black covers don’t sell.”

Justine Larbalestier, author of Liar, says she wanted an American cover similar to the Australian cover, which depicted the word “liar” in red letters. But Bloomsbury “has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted.” So why a white girl? Larbalestier says not all the girls Bloomsbury proposed were white, but the one they went with may have to do with some upsetting prejudices in the publishing and bookselling industries. She writes:

Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all.

So basically bookstores are acting like restaurants in the Jim Crow South, segregating “black covers” in a special section, or refusing to allow them at all. This may be causing presses like Bloomsbury to whitewash their covers, resulting in confusion and anger, at least among Larbalestier’s readers. One blogger asks,

Did the publishers not want to put a black girl on the cover for fear of not selling enough books to their white customers? Or is the cover supposed to be what Micah [the main character] really looks like, and her description in the book is just another of her lies?

Larbalestier says she never intended for Micah’s race to be in doubt. Nor, obviously, did she want parents not to buy the book because “my teens would find the cover offensive.” But the whitewashing of covers has implications beyond Larbalestier’s readership. She asks, “How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white?” And she points out that the idea that “black covers don’t sell” is a self-fulfilling prophecy:

I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them. Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”

Larbalestier says that publishers have historically underestimated the size of the African-American leadership, and that the music industry has no problem selling album with black artists on the cover. The supposed inviability of the “black cover” may have more to do with racist assumptions — that white people won’t be interested in a book with a black protagonist, or that black people won’t buy books — than they do with actual commercial realities. According to Larbalestier, these commercial realities haven’t even really been tested yet. But they could be — if Bloomsbury does what Larbalestier now wants, and puts a short-haired black girl on the cover of Liar.

Ain’t That A Shame [Justine Larbalestier]
YA Critics Feel Cheated By Liar Cover Girl [GalleyCat]
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire [The LibrariYAn]

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Anna North recently received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is working on a novel.  She writes about books for Jezebel, among other topics.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Elizabeth H. sent in the trailer for the movie Precious (based on the novel Push), which should be released later this year:

As Elizabeth says,

It seems to reinforce…negative associations [of] underclass or working class African-Americans: poor education, single motherhood, teenage pregnancy, abuse, child obesity, etc.

The trailer brings up some interesting issues about skin color as well. Precious’s desire for a light-skinned boyfriend highlights the emphasis placed on skin color as a measure of attractiveness: a light-skinned boyfriend would indicate her own success in the world, just as fame and wealth would. Elizabeth points out that all the “good” adult characters are light-skinned (and thin) as well.

Also see our posts on kids’ perceptions of skin color and attractiveness, an ad for skin lightener, a club letting light-skinned girls in for free, Malaysian anti-racism parody of skin lightening cream ad, and an ad that shows darker skin as more exciting.

Eugene Robinson:

Republicans’ outrage, both real and feigned, at Sotomayor’s musings about how her identity as a “wise Latina” might affect her judicial decisions is based on a flawed assumption: that whiteness and maleness are not themselves facets of a distinct identity. Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity” — black, brown, female, gay, whatever — has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.

Thus it is irrelevant if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. talks about the impact of his background as the son of Italian immigrants on his rulings — as he did at his confirmation hearings — but unforgivable for Sotomayor to mention that her Puerto Rican family history might be relevant to her work. Thus it is possible for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to say with a straight face that heritage and experience can have no bearing on a judge’s work, as he posited in his opening remarks yesterday, apparently believing that the white male justices he has voted to confirm were somehow devoid of heritage and bereft of experience.

Stephen Colbert:

If you can’t view the video, there’s a transcript after the jump, thanks to Macon D at Stuff White People Do.

Jay Livingston:

In the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, Republicans have swarmed on Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case. To hear them tell it, Sotomayor flung the law aside in upholding the lower court decision. She, the majority of the Second Circuit Court, the Federal judge who wrote the original opinion, and the four dissenting Supreme Court justices all based their opinions entirely on a preference for blacks and Hispanics and an animus towards whites. They didn’t consider the law.

By contrast, the five males (four of them white) on the Supreme Court who sided with the white male plaintiffs based their decision wholly and impartially on the law. Their race had nothing to do with it.

The Republican strategy depends on the tendency for privilege to remain invisible.

The transcript after the jump:

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Cole S.H. sent us this clip, via Salon, from Fox and Friends.  It features Brian Kilmeade, in a discussion about how marriage is positively related to mental health in Finland and Sweden, saying that the problem in America is that “…we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other…”

So he’s against inter-ethnic and -racial marriage (and willing to say so on national television) and either he is inclined to believe that racial groups are actually different “species” or he is delusional in thinking that some states U.S. states allow us to marry (other) animals.

“That’s the rule,” people. Write it down.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Feminist scholars argue that patriarchy relies not just on a hierarchy that places men above women, but a hierarchy of men that punishes men who don’t obey rules of masculinity.

An advertising campaign for Oberto Beef Jerky, sent in by Kate S., nicely illustrates the threat to men if they don’t comply with patriarchy.

The threat is: If you’re not an “Alpha,” then you’re a “Sidekick.”

The Alpha is first; the Sidekick is second. The Alpha gets served; the Sidekick serves. The Alpha gets the hot chick; the Sidekick gets the “ugly friend.” The Alpha makes the decisions; the Sidekick takes them.

In one part of the website, it actually encourages you to “establish your dominance.”   It features taunting emails and cards that you can send to your friends to trick them into looking like idiots/being your sidekick.

UPDATE: In the comments thread, Toban B. (T B) had a really nice observation:

As Murray Bookchin has written, language about ‘alpha males’ naturalizes hierarchy.

Bookchin highlights how people have conflated animal and insect interactions (e.g. ‘queen’ bees) with societal structures created by humans — as opposed to the far more instinctual of relations of non-human creatures.  (For Bookchin, there is a continuum between humans and other life forms, so these distinctions aren’t binaries.)  Basically, the point here is that if human hierarchies are the same as instinctual hierarchies (e.g. interactions with a lion ‘king’), then the human hierarchies must be just as natural and inevitable — which just isn’t the case.

Joanne suggests, further, that humans, invested in patriarchy and hierarchy, actually project it onto the natural world:

Using the terms “alpha” and “dominance” just reinforces the belief that nature exists within a patriarchal, hierarchical model.  It actually doesn’t.  I do a lot of work with horses, researching and observing the horse-human relationship, and this whole idea of “dominance” is one that has started with and is kept alive by the patriarchal worldview of Western culture.  Many observers of animal behavior are brought up in and continue to live in that worldview, so they impose it on animals and the natural world.  If you step outside of that worldview, what you find in the natural world is something entirely different.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Kristin W., Brad W., and Deb G. sent us the Bacardi Breezers “Get an Ugly Girlfriend” ad campaign, discussed over at Jezebel. The message? Ladies, if you want to look better, get an ugly female friend to stand next to:

There are profiles of the various ugly girlfriends you can get:

Of course this ad campaign suggests to women that the most important thing about them is how they look. But, more insidiously, as Sweet Machine points out, it places women “in competition with other women for male attention” in a world where “self-esteem is a zero-sum game.”

This is how patriarchy creates in-fighting among women: If men have the power, and the only way to get power is to get men, then women feel compelled to try to get (the attention of) a man (or men).  Other women are their competition.

Women are stereotyped as bitchy and catty as if it is an inherent feature of femininity when, in fact, women’s subordination to men creates the conditions that force them into competition.

We see it happen live in this horrendous clip from Battle of the Bods.

More examples of cultural endorsements of the idea that women and girls are always in competition with one another here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Commenter Joanne pointed out an update, via Shapely Prose:

Sean-Patrick Hillman of bacardi.com comments below:

June 21, 2009

Thank you for taking the time to post your story regarding Bacardi Breezer.

The campaign you are referring to ran in 2008 for two months in Israel. Even though Bacardi Breezer is not sold or distributed in the United States, we immediately notified the appropriate Bacardi affiliate and had this website shut down.

Bacardi proudly celebrates diversity and we do not endorse the views of this site.

We sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by this site and thank you for bringing it to our attention.

I’m a bit confused, though–I did a quick google search, and Bacardi Breezer seems to be sold in a lot of places, including Canada and the U.S., but maybe they’re imported by a third party and not directly by Bacardi? I know I’d heard the name Bacardi Breezer before I saw these ads. Apparently I’m going to have to go on a tour of local liquor stores to see. What a horrible life I lead.

And I also agree with several of the other commenters–how awful must it be to be cast as an “ugly” person?

Taylor sent in this ad, found at Blame It on the Voices:

It ran in Esquire in 1959 and our post on the emergence of Playboy Magazine may give the ad some interesting context.

Danielle C. sent us a video about “Muslim demographics.” When I saw the title, I assumed it was just a basic informational video about the Muslim population. Oh, indeed not:

There are so many things going on there, I’m having trouble knowing where to start. I’m going to just sidestep the many demographic assertions thrown at us, though readers may have thoughts there. It is interesting how the presence of Muslims is associated with the idea of an Islamic state–at about 3:20 the narrator says that Muslim population growth will turn France into an “Islamic Republic” by 2039 or so. But a Muslim population is not the same as an Islamic republic–one is a religious population, the other is a form of government, and they don’t automatically go together, as, say, Turkey might illustrate.

Also notice the explicit assumption that Muslims are inherently bad and that a country with an increasing Muslim population is automatically in danger (as well as the clear assumption about who “we” and “our” children and grandchildren are). In fact, while the word “immigration” is usually used in a threatening tone of voice in the video, apparently the threat from the Muslim hordes is sufficient that we may even have to accept the need for Latino immigrants, since they may be the only group that can save the U.S. for ending up like Europe, which is a lost cause already.