Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I remember seeing something questionable in a book by, I think, Richard Scarry. I never would have noticed it as a kid but as an adult, it made me go hmm. I think it was something like a black monkey eating watermelon. However, there are literally thousands of tiny vignettes in some of his books and people look really hard for patterns where there aren’t any. If you throw enough innocuous elements together haphazardly and you set enough pattern-seeking people looking at it, eventually something is going to pop out that either sounds like Shakespeare or can be interpreted as racist.
I don’t see anything racist in the OP’s particular depiction but the other posters have pointed out how some might. The ambiguity is plenty enough to indicate it’s not a great tattoo.
They did used to be fairly sexist (but in that dated way, not any overt misogynistic way). There’s been a concerted effort to correct this on recent re-issue, though.
Overall, I’d have zero issues with young kids reading Busytown, the way I might not let them near certain Seuss books. I love Busytown, it is like old-style Lego City or the city from Kiki’s Delivery Service - pleasantly generic-Europe and attractive to live in.
I think the image on the video is just really dark and poor quality. I thought the same thing at first but the actually still image he’s clearly green.
Again, it’s been explained repeatedly in this thread.
And the thread’s not about the entire picture, or about its context in the book. It’s about the duck picture taken all on its own as a tattoo, and whether that could be misinterpreted as being racist.
On my screen I still have to look twice to see green instead of dark grey shading into black. The green isn’t obvious at all.
I agreed, earlier, with the suggestion to have the tattoo make the colors much clearer: because it won’t have the context of the book to go with it,
Have you tried reading the thread? It’s been explained multiple times at this point.
Then your screen isn’t displaying correctly because the duck’s head is clearly and unquestionably green. It’s the same green as the Fox’s hat. There is nothing grey about it.
Yeah, that’s very obviously just a duck. Green duck head, grey-white duck body, orange duck feet, grey-black duck hands/wings. I think you need more than “wearing generic old country clothes” and “dancing” to start the accusations of racism.
The still is a lot clearer than the video - I wouldn’t have the same reservations about that one.
Just make sure your tattoo artists gets the color reproduction right.
Well, it’s very obviously not “just a duck”, given that it is wearing a hat and other garments, and dancing in an upright stance, and holding a stick in its feather “fingers”, all of which, very obviously, actual ducks do not do.
The fact that you unquestioningly accept this lack of realism in the context of the folktale narrative, when you see an anthropomorphized duck as one of the quasi-human characters, but don’t even notice it in the context of potential racist stereotypes, when you perceive it as “just a duck”, illustrates how reflexive and baked-in our perceptions of visual imagery can be.
I would have expected people to recognize the context of my “just a duck” statement but I guess that was asking too much.
That was the point I was making: when you’re scanning the image for potential impressions of racist stereotypes, suddenly the anthropomorphizing features that actually make up a big part of its visual impact seem irrelevant to the point of invisibility. I think that has a lot to do with culturally induced obliviousness.
Or, you know… it’s just a duck and not a racist stereotype we’re all too blind by cultural bias to see. Which, yeah, it’s a duck.
Saying “It’s just a duck” doesn’t need someone saying “Oh ho! Ducks don’t wear hats!” or “It’s actually a drawing of a duck!” or whatever. Not mentioning the blindingly obvious fact that we’re talking about a storybook illustration doesn’t show anything beyond “I assume anyone reading this post understands what I’m talking about”.
Not with that attitude you won’t! Try harder to find it, even if it’s not there!
Yeah, this thread is a bit absurd. It’s a duck- many types are dark. And it’s a country duck, so it’s wearing country clothes. These days it would probably have pressed jeans and a camo baseball hat.
Based on the rest of Richard Scarry’s stuff that I’ve seen (most of it, FWIW), there’s not really any racist elements in his work. And I have read a lot of it to my kids in the past 5 or so years, so it’s not like I’m remembering it from my youth or anything.
That’s the problem here… if enough outraged people are looking, they’re going to find something, whether or not it makes any real sense on a second consideration.
I mean, why isn’t someone getting bent out of shape about Lowly Worm? He’s a worm, and he’s brown!
Thanks. I didn’t watch enough of the video to know what the issue was. FWIW, the head looks green to me, and the image doesn’t ping my “racism” detectors. Not that I have the best-tuned racism detectors, but I don’t know if it would even have occurred to me to ask this question.
AFAICT from, you know, reading the thread, I don’t think anybody’s trying to argue that there’s any racist intention in this portrayal of a duck in this story, or even that it would unintentionally come across as racist in the context of the story.
The question is whether this particular image of a duck might seem reminiscent of minstrel imagery if taken out of context, i.e., in an isolated tattoo. There’s nothing accusatory in that. All of us living in a historically racist society have some images encoded in our brains as “normal” and “harmless” that are historically based in racist stereotypes, and there’s no need to be sensitive about that.
Out of context, this is my new favorite question.
It might be partly my screen; though if I look at this image Can Stock Photo or this one Green Head Duck Standing on Ice Stock Image - Image of fowl, duck: 145293453 on the same screen in the same program I see obviously green heads, so it’s not that green doesn’t display on my screen.
I think it’s partly that my eyes, at least, expect hands and face to be the same color; and the green isn’t bright enough to overcome that impression.
While I don’t expect bird wings to be the same color as bird heads, the “wings” in that picture are so anthromorphized that they register to me as hands – five “fingers” (maybe four on the left hand), hand and arm positions rather than plausible wing positions.
There’s a lot of optical illusion involved in what colors people see in any given graphic. Again, if I look at that still picture instead of my stop-action attempt at seeing the figure in the video, and if I look at it hard as if somebody asked me what color the Ducky Lucky figure’s head is, I see green. When I looked at the video, stopped on that picture; or if I look at the picture linked as a still without inspecting specifically for what color individual bits of it are, I just see dark hands and head.
Again, the question isn’t, is there bigotry in the book? The question is, could this image from the book, taken entirely on its own as a tattoo, be seen by others as possibly racist?
Or “Is the fact that some rando might incorrectly interpret a tattoo and get mad over an innocent picture of a duck reason enough to not get the tattoo?”