Victoria Foyt is the (white) author of a new young adult book series called Save the Pearls. The book chronicles the adventures of Eden Newman, a white woman, or a “Pearl,” whose entire race has been enslaved by the dominant race of “Coals” — or dark-skinned people. Hoping to capitalize off of the popularity of dystopian young adult novels like The Hunger Games, Foyt constructed a narrative in which, she explains, “Solar radiation has wiped out most of the white race whose lack of melanin causes them to succumb to the Heat. The survivors, called Pearls, suffer from oppression under the new majority of dark-skinned Coals.” In the new world, Eden must rely on Bramford, a Coal. As Foyt describes it, Pearls is “a Beauty and the Beast story in which both parties must find self-acceptance before they can discover true love.”

“Pearl” as a term for whiteness ascribes high value, rareness, beauty and worth. And Coal as a term for dark-skinned? Low value and dirty. And as blogger Nnamdi Bawse points out, it’s a tried and true racial slur. But even without the shameful history of the slur, choosing such wildly divergent names, holding wildly divergent values, implies a positive value judgement on whiteness and a negative value judgment on blackness.


Then let’s take the “Beauty and the Beast” analogy. To refer to a dark-skinned man as “beastly” carries with it negative notions of blackness that are rooted in a historical portrayal of black men as sexually savage beasts. As Dr. David Pilgrim, professor of Sociology at Ferris State University writes, “During the Radical Reconstruction period (1867-1877), many white writers argued that without slavery — which supposedly suppressed their animalistic tendencies — blacks were reverting to criminal savagery.” So essentially, the construction of black men as “beastly” was used to justify slavery. So, awesome. Yeah, NO.

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3. The world of coals, pearls, ambers, is so unique. How much fun was it world-building and how much energy went into it?

Big fun, and a little scary too. I wrestled with some of the details of Eden’s post-apocalyptic world. For example, creating racial epithets, rather than using existing ones that are already deeply ingrained in our culture, seemed the best way of turning long-standing prejudices upside down. I played with different ideas, and even used animal names at one point, but they also carried too much baggage. Then the idea of using simple, earthy things to represent the different races struck me. The words pearl, coal, tiger’s eye, amber, and cotton all represent beautiful natural things, just as all races are equally beautiful. Of course, these invented racial terms also tie into the environmental theme, and initially create mystery, too. That was a good day’s work.