You can always tell when a board of people making decisions are made up entirely of white dudes. Usually it’s by the photos they have proudly displayed on their websites, but other times you can tell by the ideas that never would have gone ahead if they’d have asked a single person who wasn’t a white dude. The accidentally racist release of classic ‘Diversity Editions’ is one of those cases.
Penguin Random House has decided to put out the diversity editions of literary classics in honour of Black History Month over in the USA. According to the promotional material, they ran a heap of classic books through an AI and all of the books that “omitted ethnicity of primary characters” got a cover redesign with the protagonist portrayed as black.
The books with diversity editions are:
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- Emma
- Frankenstein
- Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
- Moby Dick
- Peter Pan
- The Secret Garden
- The Three Musketeers
- Treasure Island
- Romeo & Juliet
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
I’m sure that they thought they were on the verge of solving racism by making Peter Pan black, but the campaign has gone down like a ton of bricks from the yellow brick road.
Sure, if you read the books then the protagonists skin colour might not be directly mentioned, but are we really trying to convince ourselves that the authors weren’t writing about white characters? Some of the depictions of Native Americans in Peter Pan are very iffy, and the whole point of Frankenstein’s Monster is that he’s not human, so making him black as a diversity play seems… not great.
All of this comes after we had to watch the racism Meghan Markle was subjected to. Listen to The GOAT Team chat about why #Megxit was so great…
For pete’s sake, there’s a quote from the main girl in The Secret Garden – a book about a girl born in British India – which literally goes “You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people – they’re servants who must salaam to you.”
Tell me that doesn’t sound like a spoiled white kid.
As people have repeatedly pointed out over this, we don’t need old books reimagined with black protagonists. What we need is for the works of non-white authors to be celebrated just as much as we celebrate white authors, and as Barnes & Noble said in their apology tweet, “the covers are not a substitute for black voices or writers, whose work and voices deserve to be heard.”
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