“This is great.
I want to address a review that says this is a whitewashing of Gary Coleman’s story:
This book is a definite fictional mash-up of tons of child stars with a lot of fiction thrown in.
Whitewashing is taking a story featuring a person of color and changing the character to a white person to make it more palatable to a white audience.
I think this may be a case of whitewashing to make a story more palatable, but in a very different way.
The child star depicted in this book is…not a sympathetic character, for the most part. He’s not shown as a good guy. He’s not an aspirational character, and the sympathy is complicated because he doesn’t seem like a nice dude, but the reader also has to wonder how much of that is his fault. If anyone were raised in those circumstances, they really can be excused for being unpleasant. The star of the book isn’t like a sexual predator or a criminal, he’s just not all that into people, he’s rude, and he’s not shown to be all that smart or clever. It’s what makes the book interesting. It tells you about a character, and I suspect different readers will walk away feeling differently about the character.
The character is not directly interviewed “for the book” and does not “speak” in the book. The book is like a profile of this character. Think of what you’d see on a 20/20 where the person they’re profiling isn’t interviewed directly for this particular project. So the character is, in a way, voiceless in the book.
Here’s the issue: It’s my opinion that at this time, readers want diverse characters, but they don’t necessarily want those diverse characters to be complicated. This is why, for example, comics have more diverse heroes, but nobody really talks about the diversity of the villains. Nobody complains that Joker, Two-Face, Riddler, Catwoman, Penguin, Clayface, Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze, Mad Hatter, Scarecrow, all white. Bane has a white father and Latina mother, but few have mentioned his all-white casting in movies and TV as whitewashing. Killer Croc is black, although I think there’s a relevant argument here that a crocodile man’s ethnicity is probably not going to inform him, culturally, as much as the other obvious factors…
In fact, early in the Miles Morales days, I read many complaints because Miles’ uncle was a criminal. “Oh, so the criminal is black.” Well…yes, but the main hero is as well (black and Puerto Rican), and his father, a black man, is a former criminal, now a police officer (the father and uncle, brothers, got in trouble together when they were young).
Anyway, I think that when you depict a heroic character, diversity is a really important factor to readers. And maybe, when the hero is a villain, people are less inclined to tally the diversity of the characters. I understand the concept, that people want to see themselves reflected in the stories they read, and I don’t think most people want to see themselves in The Joker, or at least aren’t going to make a stink about not getting the opportunity to see themselves in Gotham’s most notorious killer. I know that little white kids have the opportunity to see themselves in a lot of heroes, but if we’re going on looks, I was a lot more Doctor Octopus (bowl cut, questionable fashion, corrective lenses) than I was Captain America.
Don’t confuse me for complaining about this. I don’t particularly care if every villain stays white forever, if they are diversified, whatever. What I’m getting at is that I think the movement regarding diverse books is in the early stages, showing characters of different races, but it’s still not succeeding in making them super 3-dimensional, good and bad, and I think that’s especially clear when we’re talking about complicated characters, characters who aren’t good or bad, they’re just…real.
Let’s bring it back to Child Star.
If Box Brown depicted the character as black, he would have to work through, in public, the commentary of people who feel he depicted a black character a certain way, and if the character were the same and was not admirable, that could be a problem.
There’s also the possibility that making the character black makes him undeniably Gary Coleman, and that comes with the baggage of people taking what you do with the character and turning into a narrative about Gary Coleman. “Gary Coleman never did that.” “I always found Gary Coleman very pleasant.” Your accuracy to Gary Coleman’s life becomes a big part of the way people read this, and I don’t think that was the target of Box Brown’s work. Brown did a great profile of Andre the Giant, and I think if he wanted to do another, he would’ve done a great Gary Coleman book.
Sometimes you want to do things with a character that make the story better or more interesting, but you don’t want readers to apply those things to a specific person. I read Child Star without assuming any of the behaviors were true of Gary Coleman.
So, this book is whitewashed? Maybe. The character is white, and I do think that makes the character more palatable to today’s audiences. But not in the traditional way where the audience is expected to like this character, to want to befriend him or whatever. If it’s whitewashed, it’s my guess that this is because the author doesn’t want to be perceived as beating up on black characters.
It’s also possible that this is strongly based on Gary Coleman, and Box Brown didn’t want to disrespect Coleman’s memory with some of the storylines or didn’t have access to conversations or co-stars of Coleman’s, so it’d be difficult to do this in a sensitive, ethical way. “