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Originally Posted by doubleshuffle
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Hard to be "balanced" on this one.
By itself, "diversifying" the covers isn't inherently offensive (except tbe FRANKENSTEIN cover, that is just hysterically awful) but in tbe context of BLACKHISTORY MONTH?
Implying that a proper way to celebrate black literary culture is to blackface other people's works?
And how balanced is it to blame everything on the PR firm, but not the publisher, or the artists who did the covers, or B&N execs who all saw nothing wrong?
A project like this isn't two guys in a garage. There's a whole load of those books in warehouses all over. Somebody had to write proposals, commission, draw, and accept the covers, get the books printed and shipped from the printer to the distribution warehouses.
And not one person saw anything wrong or spoke out until they held tbe press conference to launch tbe glorious initiative?
No. it was all just the PR agency.
Just last week tbere was another catfight over another mess in NYC publishing involving not just "insensitivity" or " cultural appropriation" but plagiarism of tbe "genteel" kind.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-appropriation
There are a dozen reports all over detailing all the ways that particular mess pushed buttons all over but the one that stands out to me is the same as above:
Nobody in the entire process saw *anything wrong* in paying a million bucks for a book built around paraphrased sections of other people's books. Despite the author citing the (dated) books the episodes were lifted from.
It says more about the industry and its machinery (an Oprah book club selection!) than the book or the author.
In this environment, blackface covers were inevitable.