daggerpen: wishyouweremegan replied to your post: As much as I loved Secret Six…Not just...

daggerpen:

wishyouweremegan replied to your post: As much as I loved Secret Six…

Not just you.

Like

She’s about as dark as Talia is, and clearly darker than the very white Knockout?

And then in the later issues-

Now she and Knockout are the same skin tone?

I’m not blaming Gail for this, since I don’t think the writers have much power to change this type of stuff if a colorist can’t find the goddamn brown crayon, but it’s still bleh.

Nope, you are absolutely right. It happened gradually enough that it slipped by in most cases.

And I don’t let myself off the hook whatsoever. We don’t usually get to see color proofs anymore, the last stage we are usually involved in is proofing final lettering in black and white.

But I didn’t notice the gradual whitewashing until it was later. I did ask to have it changed several times. But it kept fading back to white.

And before anyone says it, yes, I am aware that there are lots of Caucasian Brazilians. The point being made is that Scandal is supposed to be darker complected.

You guys have every right to point this out, it’s irritating. I’m sorry on behalf of the whole team.

The infuriating thing is that MOST of the colorists I work with are people of color themselves. I had whitewashing of Asians once in a book where the entire art team was Asian.

I’m not trying to dilute the message, I’m not even BLAMING the colorists. To me, it seems an endemic problem that it’s just assumed almost all the characters are white. I can’t blame them for thinking characters are white if 99.91879% of the characters are white already.

There must be a way to make this not happen all the time, it’s really just unfair. it just seems that little extra bit sad when the colorists are themselves POC, somehow. Makes me think we are not doing our job at all on diversity. The expectation should NOT default to white every time.

I will try harder to make sure that the colorists know who is POC. Oddly, putting it in the script is not enough, many colorists don’t read the script…some don’t speak English.

There’s got to be a way to avoid this.