On whitewashing

[akashiver]

Yoinked from matociquala: Justine Larbalestier on "whitewashing" in cover art.

I first noticed the whitewashing phenomenon as a kid reading R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt series. Drizzt is an immensely popular character, and is notably dark-skinned (it's a major plot point in every book). While it was ok for him to be depicted as dark-skinned on the original 90s cover of The Crystal Shard (Salvatore's first Forgotten Realms book), when he was a sidekick to be depicted crouching at the feet of the blond, white-skinned warrior hero, once Drizzt became a starring character, the cover art changed to depicting him as an old white guy. Really. The fans hated it, but it was the standard through the 90s. It's only when Wizards of the Coast started reissuing the books with art by Todd Lockwood that Drizzt was once more depected as having dark skin.

When I was teaching my fantasy class I would put up overheads of the changiing Drizzt covers, and the changing depictions of Ged in Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea books. The first time I taught the lesson was the same year that the godawful SF miniseries came out. When I put up the poster for the whitewashed miniseries there was a shocked silence. I didn't get any more "racism doesn't exist nowadays" comments for the rest of the semester.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Which ones had the white-guy covers? My copies of the Icewind Dale books showed him as black, or at least brown, but many of the subsequent books (Starless Night in particular) had such screwed-up color values that they're pretty much a mess -- he's grey, he's maybe sort of faintly brown, and for some reason he's invariably fugly (Seige of Darkness being the one exception). But I don't know if there were others, worse ones, that I never saw.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of the Menzoberranzan trilogy, and the opening "oh no, drow" book covers. The Legacy & Starless Night (http://www.amazon.com/Starless-Night-Forgotten-Realms-Legacy/dp/1560768800) were the worst offenders. Whoever that artist was had a very pale looking Drizzt from The Halfling's Gem onwards. In Gem it was justified for plot reasons (he's posing as a Golden Elf), but the same portrayals were used in all of the other books. They tried to tint Drizzt's skin darker with each subsequent printing in response to fan complaints, (including in this capture), but he's very obviously whitewashed, particularly when compared to his appearance on the cover of The Crystal Shard (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/r-a-salvatore/crystal-shard.htm)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Okay, it was what I was thinking of, then. I didn't know if there was something even worse out there, was all.

There's some interesting practical issues around depicting drow -- especially if you go for a dark cover, then a true-black face turns the whole thing very muddy and unclear. I suspect this is why grey has become the go-to color for signifying "drow" (in some of the old D&D art, it was purple, god help us all). Facial features are also a point of negotiation; it doesn't make sense for them to look African, and in fact I'm wholeheartedly in favor of not going that route (seeing as how drow=evil), but for some reason artists seem reluctant to make them elf-pretty, so they all just end up looking weird.

Art was something I had to cut from my ICFA paper, for reasons of time. I couldn't do justice to thirty years of RPG and novel publishing on a textual and graphical front.