Maybe I’m awful, but when I was reading The BFG to my second-graders, I skipped over entire paragraphs of hilarious ethnic stereotyping (he won’t eat Eskimos because they’re too cold, Hottentots because they’re too hot, Greeks because they’re too greasy, etc.). Discussing why ethnic jokes are problematic is a great discussion to have, but I was reading the book for the pleasure of the words, and I didn’t want to sidetrack it with a discussion of ethnic jokes at that point, nor did I want to gloss over it as though it were not problematic.
Of course, then I put their heads in the cages with the rats.
It wasn’t Buttermaker who hit a kid on his own team it was the opposing coach who did so to the pitcher of his team who was also his son. The coach smacked his son because he thought he pitched a beanball to a Bear on purpose because it “could have killed him”. So it wasn’t because the rival coach was some kind of monster who hit is son for not being a good pitcher. People still smacked their kids like that but I think the tense moment was that it was in public where everyone could see. Kind of like when you’re with another couple that starts arguing or sniping at one another. We all do it but it’s really uncomfortable when you’re witnessing what shouldn’t be a public spectacle.
Yeah, hitting a kid like that just doesn’t fly in the 2000s.
Odesio
Incidentally destroying the meter. “Chinaman” doesn’t have quite the same stress pattern as “Chinese boy,” and the rhythm (which changes throughout the book) is very important.
There’s a nice introduction by, I believe, his grandson Christopher Lofting, who explains that the word choice was not intended to be racist or exclusionary, and Hugh Lofting would have been appalled had he realized how it would have sounded today. Maybe true, maybe not, but it was a nice way to spin the editing.
And Malleus, Incus, Stapes!: re: the Grimm brothers and the fairy tale about the Jew: you do realize that they didn’t create the stories from scratch, right? Also that their original 1812 publication was not intended for children? They were (more or less) documenting oral tradition. I’m not sure anti-Semitism at that period was all that remarkable, more’s the pity.
I heartily agree, children ARE capapble of understanding discrimination. And they need to see where society has been to understand how society got to where it is and to appreciate what the world today offers, particularily to non whites and non christians.
Background: My wife and I are both agnostic, but I’m careful to use expressions like, “Some people believe …” when religious issues are raised by one of our daughters, rather than saying “It’s a crock.” If pressed (“But Daddy, does heaven actually exist?”) I usually go with “No-one really knows.”
One of my daughters was given a Little Golden Book of the “Noah’s Ark” story. I’m telling you, if you try to read that story without the religious message it’s really nasty. Death and destruction everywhere.
What happened to all the other people?
They died.
Everyone?
Yes.
Why?
Things had got out of hand and people were behaving badly.
Even the babies?
Umm …
Fortunately I can resort to, “Even people who believe in God don’t think this really happened - it’s just used to make a point.” (I haven’t talked with them about Bible literalists - they’re only 6 and 4.)
Um, what? That’s not ethnic stereotyping; Dahl’s just playing with words. Like people from Labrador taste like dogs, and people from Wellington taste like boots, and people from Turkey taste like (guess what) turkey. My personal favorite was when one of the giants announced he was off to Miss Souri and Mrs. Sippi to eat them both; I grew up in Miss Souri.
I never understood this one, Chinaman to Chinese boy, sure I guess. But I never understood the inherent racism in “yellow,” don’t Chinese (well, Han at least) people refer to themselves as yellow, and even further, as decedents/children of the Yellow Emperor rather proudly? Or is this one of the disconnects between second/third generation immigrants and people from the mainland?
First off, Hottentots is an ethnic slur (Dahl almost certainly didn’t use it that way, but it’s understood as such by the folks it’s directed at). Second, second-graders can be very literal-minded, and the distinction you’re drawing, while relevant, is one that would escape their notice most likely. It’s easier to skip these passages than to discuss the difference between stereotyping based on puns and stereotyping based on perceived ethnic traits.
Swallows and Amazons depicts a world which most parents would shy away from these days… under-10s taking a small boat out on a huge lake for a full day and night, with no lifejackets or mobile phones.
Some people might say we’re the poorer for it, but even the rose-tinted nostaliga-fan in me would baulk at allowing my daughter to disappear in a boat on a deep lake for that length of time without adult supervision or safety equipment.
I’m not sure it’s worth censoring the books for, but I’d want to make sure my kids didn’t blindly follow that type of adventure.
Heh. I can assure you that as a second-grader my problem would be not that I’d absorb this as stereotyping on ethnic traits and more that I would be shocked later on in life to find out that “Hottentot” was actually a real word and not one that Dahl made up to make a joke. (I had a similar problem with “mitochondria” when I read L’Engle’s Wind in the Door ).
Not sure the vintage, but there was a series of children’s books concerning the mis-adventures of “Little Brown Koko”. Koko was always in trouble with his Mamy for playing hooky, stealing watermelons, you name the stereotype.
My mom was a teacher in the 1950s, and the school library pulled these from the shelves. Thinking that a waste, my mom brought them home, where I was probably among the last children in America to be raised on these stereotypes. There must have been at least 10 or more of these books in our house.
Even mom was influenced by the 1960s, and the books were eventually let go…not sure what became of them. Apparentlythey’d fetch a fair price today.
I have never heard any Asian or Asian-American person describe their skin color as “yellow”, unless they were being sarcastic. I’ve never been to China and don’t speak Chinese so I don’t know how they refer to themselves, but when I lived in Japan more than one person asked me if Americans really referred to Asians as “yellow monkeys”. It was clear that they felt this was a racist insult.
Oh, and the Yellow Emperor didn’t get his name from his skin color.
As for the OP, The Story of Dr. Dolittle is a possible candidate. I’ve never read the book, but when I was in library school the issue of edited version of old children’s books came up once in a class discussion. My professor told us that many modern editions of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, including some that claim to be the complete text of the original book, either omit or rewrite a section in which the good doctor requires the assistance of an African prince named Bumpo. The prince enjoys reading European fairy tales and once managed to locate a Sleeping Beauty of his own, but she rejected him because he was black. Prince Bumpo wants nothing more than to become a white prince, and in exchange for his help Dr. Dolittle mixes up a potion that turns his face white and his eyes blue.
My instructor said she’d dealt with parents and schoolteachers who wanted a cleaned-up version of Dr. Dolittle to read to their children/students, but that while she was happy to tell them what versions of the book were available she always recommended that they just find some other book that fit their standards. There are plenty of children’s books that don’t involve black men desperate to turn themselves white*, and there’s no particular reason why modern children need to be exposed to Dr. Dolittle.
I’ve heard several exchange students refer to themselves as yellow completely unironically, though I’ll admit it may be a case of them hearing a slur and misinterpreting it (and note this is only mainland Chinese people, not any other nationality). And I know that about the Yellow Emperor, I’m just saying a lot of times people can take pride in a fact that is only tangentially related to the actual meaning if it’s in the name.
So basically instead of trying to understand “WHY” things were like they were it’s best to cover them up???
My objection is what’s racist often isn’t really so, but merely an opinion. Look at the Our Gang comedies there may be one or two side jokes based on race, but in no short are the black kids presented as anything less but equal to the white kids. If there is any message in those shorts it’s that wealthy people are evil.
Reminds me of an episode of Leave it to Beaver where Ward gives the boys Tom Sawyer to read and June picks up the books and says “You know I had forgotten all the things Tom does. He curses, runs away and is disrespectful.”
So Ward tells Wally and the Beaver, that while Tom Sawyer is fine as literature, and that was just part of growing up when Tom was a boy, times have changed. Wally says “Of course I know that, if we tried to do those things today people would call us a delinquent.”
I think it’s better to explain WHY it was like it was than just erase it.
As a gay male it really bugs me that no one of the younger generation has any clue about how bad AIDS was before drugs. They have no idea, that people would simply lose their jobs because they were gay. I tell people I’ve lost jobs 'cause I was gay, and these young gays are shocked, “How could they do that?”
It awful that gays have largely swept huge periods of history under the rug and even worse don’t care. As a man who was a teen/early 20s during the early 80s when the worst of the worst of AIDS was going on, I find it appaling that now the attidude of gay people is “Thank God we don’t have to think about that anymore.”
And I think ignoring history is bad enough, but when you remove it all together, well…"
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