Whitewashing

By Jessica Brown in people:   

This author exposed whitewashing in publishing with one tweet:

           

Fantasy/sci-fi writer Nnedi Okorafor has outed her former publisher in a series of tweets and hightailed the issue of whitewashing in the publishing industry.

Okorafor’s book’s main character is a black woman, but her publishers proposed this cover on the left:

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD
✔@Nnedi

As a black woman writing a black female main character in a scifi novel, seeing my character whitewashed on the cover felt-like-erasure

It allegedly took a "sh*t fit" to get them to agree in the cover on the right:

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD
✔@Nnedi

Cover on left was the proposed cover. Cover on the right was the finished cover after I threw a sh*t fit (tapered by my agent).

Okorafor, who was the first black person to win the World Fantasy Award for best novel since its inception in 1975, said she described the main character very clearly:

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD
✔@Nnedi

I described Ejii as "black skinned" and subsaharan African, story set in NIGER and that left cover was proposed to me. WTF.

And the designer's excuse? "There were too few stock images of black girls".

Since the book was published ten years ago, she says she has made sure it's never happened again:

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD
✔@Nnedi

No worries. Nothing like that cover issue will happen again. Better publishers, better times. Now it's up to readers to do their parts.