Covering Up YA Characters

When you are exposed to as many books as a librarian, you start to notice a few trends in books covers.  After three + years of experience as a Young Adult Services Librarian and many more years as a reader, it is high time I put in my two cents about this issue.  While there are many trends that come and go within themes, plots, covers, and more in Young Adult literature, something bugs me as it bugs countless others: whitewashing.  The infographic above is from a series of charts depicting trends from YA author Kate Hart.  While these are really cool, this one in particular draws attention to the fact that character depiction on YA covers is sorely misrepresented.

For those of you unaware or unsure of what whitewashing is, don’t feel bad!  It’s little blogs like this that are just meant to spread awareness!  Whitewashing is the use of a Caucasian representation to depicta character that is not white.  Plenty of examples of this can be seen on The Book Smugglers blog post.

There are several problems with this practice, not least of which is pushing aside entire races in misrepresentations.  These types of issues are ways in which consumerism takes society a giant step backwards, promoting ideas that readers are only interested in cover depicting Caucasian characters or, even worse, that stories are only written about Caucasian characters.  This skews the representation of both books and readers.  Plenty of books represent a variety of races, but whitewashing often covers this up (no pun intended).

So, what can we do?  While it may not seem like a lot, we can talk about it.  We are highly influential!  For instance, a Fierce Reads booktralier for the popular dystopian book Cinder by Marissa Meyer depicted Cinder as Caucasian, though she is a resident of “New Beijing” and is described as a mixture of Asian races.   However, if we scroll down just a little, the comments feature many of people discussing this very thing.  While those who did not notice are certainly not terrible people, it only supports the idea that readers can simply have more exposure to multicultural readers in order to process all that they read.

Basically, know that you are influential.  You can make a difference in trends!