I hope I do.
What about Little Black Sambo*? He was Indian, and he was black.
Which was actually a really cool story, and it’s a shame about the title, because the naming of the characters is the worst thing about the book. Sambo himself was smart and tough and had bags of agency.
I completely agree with you and that was something that I thought about. Little Black Sambo was written by a Scottish author that lived in India. There is nothing offensive about the story at all but the title led people to assume that it depicted stereotypes of people in Africa although dead giveaway should have been the fact that key parts of the story are about defeating a tiger even though tigers do not live naturally in Africa but they do in India.
Most people still think Little Black Sambo is African and that is why it is effectively banned (not literally but you won’t find it in any bookstores) in the U.S. even though there is nothing wrong with it and it has nothing to do with American blacks at all. It is an excellent example of how racial perceptions can become hopelessly distorted and misinterpreted as they travel from one place to another.
Trudat…but in the US illustrations were almost always pickaninny plantation bullshit (as in John R. Neill’s 1908 illustrations and UB Iwerk’s 1935 cartoon adaptation). Americans have long been good at seeing dark skin and making all sorts of shitheaded assumptions.
Yes, it’s really a great story. But it’s got so much baggage thanks to pop culture depictions like the above examples that I even feel a little guilty about making tiger butter. But only a little.
Sure. But to counter what you are pleased to call your point, despite the fact that the text makes it clear that Sambo was Indian, US editions were happy to keep the title and text but add their own illustrations with a “piccaninny” version of Sambo. The publishers, then, didn’t see your quoted distinction* between Indian and “black”, and were happy to use the term interchangeably. Which further means that you’re just making shit up.
*
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
Indigenous populations from the Indian subcontinent are not ‘black’ by definition in American terminology no matter how dark their skin is.
[/QUOTE]
Also I have just noticed that that tiger has a fucking watch.
Having read the previous 86 posts, I have come to a conclusion regarding the subject of this thread. to wit:
How long has Shagnasty been a dishonest dickhead?
And I will state with a moment of doubt that the defendent is not dishonest.
Press on.
**Momnasty **sounds like she’d be pretty famous, if she’s an author and lecturer who toured all 48 contiguous states and every continent except Antarctica. Is there a link to her book somewhere online? I’d like to see what kind of motivational support she used to raise her son.
I wish we could tag people with little notes, visible only to us, so we can remember who’s who. Mods? Any chance of that happening?
He had a dear old black Mammy for that.
nm
Oops, I thought you were quoting Shagnasty. That’s what I get for not wearing my reading glasses.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around a cultural standard of “blackness” that has Obama Sr as a black man, and President Obama as NOT a black man. Part of that may be growing up in the South, which had the one-drop rule. Langston Hughes (was he black enough?) said this:
You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word ‘Negro’ is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown.
Shagnasty’s version of Blackness is I know it when I see it. Any dark-skinned person who doesn’t fit his negroid version of blackness is simply not black. Ethiopians? Not black. Not “sub-Saharan” enough.
My biggest problem with him? His refusal to use commas in his wall-o-texts. How hard would it be for someone of his extremely high (though non-black unmusical) intelligence to use a fucking comma every once in awhile? Don’t they teach it in almost-PhD school?
His whole problem is that it’s not.
If he could tell us what it is that he sees, he wouldn’t have a problem. The problem is that he says he knows it when he sees it, and then when you show him people who look identical to him, he tells you that one is not Black and one is based on things that he can’t see. And when you show him two people who look nothing alike, he tells you that they are both Back base don things that he can’t see.
His whole stance is pathetically inconsistent.
He claims that he can can see that a Sri Lankan is not Black, then he tells you that he only knows they are not Black because of their ancestry, which obviously he can’t see.
He claims that OJ Simpson, Usain Bolt and every major Black sports star in the US is Black, and so many Black sports stars tells him something about genes and race. But Black sports stars look exactly like Barack Obama or a Sri Lankan and he has no ide at all about their ancestry. But he still knows they are Black despite not seeing any physical difference and not seeing any ancestral difference.
He is twisting and squirming like a rat going up a drainipe.
I bit the bullet and read that exchange. Now I am significantly more stupid.
Maybe he doesn’t know what phenotype means.
I run into this problem when discussing race and people confuse phenotype and genotype.
It’s completely circular. He can tell you something about a person by knowing their race, but in order to know their race you have to know where they’re from, and their entire heritage. Or if they play football. It’s orthogonal to science and reason.
Post after post of shit thathe made up, followed by blatant lies to try to cover for his stupidity. I particularly like this one:
:rolleyes:
Fucking liar.
It really is amazing. We know next to nothing about the Sentinelese. Literally, we know about a dozen facts about them. Shagnasty has posted 6 statements about them and has been wrong on 5 of those. It’s like he’s *trying *to post things that are incorrect and easily proven to be incorrect.
And we have anotherr. Same thread.
Me: Any claim that they are unapproachable is utterly false. Here is reference from a team of anthropologists who approached them many times over many years.
:rolleyes:
No, aside from the fact that he said the Sentinelese are unapproachable and my reference documenting multiple intimate approaches, it doesn’t refute much at all.