Posted By Jax2 on 12 May 2012 03:59 PM

Then I glanced over the pages available via the "Look Inside" option for Dragon City on Amazon and found this description of Reba DeFore:

"...almost ghostlike pallor her already pale skin."

For all its worth, the context of that passage is that DeFore is pale from the shock of sustained recent emotional and physical trauma, not that her skin is naturally pale. In the books since the new author(s) took over, she has consistently been described as having a bronze complexion.

I'm not saying you gotta like the new books, I'm just saying that that particular example is not as egregious (in context) as you might think, without having read the events that lead up to it.

Unless that physical trauma included being sprayed with a skin bleaching agent, your defense doesn't track.

You can argue that as an African-American woman, DeFore's complexion might be "ashen" due to fright or pain, but the sentence reads "almost ghostlike pallor of her ALREADY pale skin."

(Emphasis on ALREADY is mine.)

"Like" has nothing to do with it.

Shoddy is shoddy.

Mark, is Reba described anywhere as being African American? After all the Deathlands manuscripts that I've edited and the several Outlanders manuscripts that I copyedited I tend to forget snippets of info. I cannot recall Reba getting the label African American. She's your character, of course, so if she's African American, she's African American. I suppose I should so back to where it all started and reread her intro.

You could do that.

 Or the writers could do what I did when I started writing DL...

Perform due diligence with a little research into what had come before.

 That way, there wouldn't have been such classic scenes as dead characters being encountered in the cafeteria sipping coffee or illiterate Domi inexplicably knowing how to pilot Stealth aircraft or Brigid carrying an interphaser around in her back...as one wag here put it...presumably disguised as a hump.

 There are a lot more than those three things...those examples are just off the top of my head.

 Grant was never specifically labelled "African American", either. But when Reba passed for a native African woman in Rim of the World, that should have been all the label anybody should need.

Anybody who actually gave a fraction of a crap, that is.

"Ghostlike pallor..." 

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