[LINK] "White People Don't Understand"

[rfmcdonald]

Andrew Barton introduced me to the controversy surrounding the racism presented in American YA writer Victoria Holt's novel Save the Pearls, and the terrible, terrible decisions made by the editorial staff of Weird Tales in defending their decision to publish a chapter.

Painful, all of it. Also, what Andrew says.

Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt dovetails with the whole "crapsack dystopia" thing that appears to be common in Young Adult novels lately, [but] it takes a sharp turn away from the pack with the way it treats racism. See, Save the Pearls is set in a world where whites are the weak, oppressed lower class, known as "pearls," and society is dominated by black people, called "coals."

Are you beginning to see the issue already?

That doesn't even cover the use of blackface, references to black characters as "beastly," and so on. The book's reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative, and as of this writing it has a two-star review due mainly to a handful of higher reviews... including that of Marvin Kaye, editor of Weird Tales magazine, who calls it "a thoroughly non-racist book." I, for one, am relieved by the assurances of this aging white man that it's non-racist. I mean, if you can't trust a white man who grew up in the mid-20th century as the final arbiter of whether or not something is racist, who can you trust?

For the record, I don't think that Save the Pearls was written to be racist, or that the $100 bill was redesigned for that reason. Instead, it's more of a problem that's endemic to white authors tackling racism--they don't understand it, but they think they do anyway, and they are incapable of recognizing how the unspoken assumptions of their upbringing affect their work. They are taking something they don't understand and filtering it through their own lens, a lens that does not see things in quite the same way as other people do.