This is inspired by the recent thread I started on the decision to withdraw six Dr. Seuss books from publication. The gist of that was that the books in question – published from 1937 to the 1960s – had depictions of Chinese, Middle Eastern, African, and other people that are, to modern eyes, grossly unacceptable stereotypes. They have been all along, of course, but they weren’t seen that way when originally published. There has been a lot of “consciousness-raising” since then, with more cionsideration given to the attitudes of others and the way these things look to those who were not the intended audience. That these caricatures weren’t intended to be insulting is true, but the point is that they are, of course.
What surprises me is how similarly racist cartoons and comic books in the 1960s were, when I was growing up. And were just as blithely accepted, at least at first.
not always, though. The Pillsbury Funny Face Drink characters Chinese Cherry and Injun Orange were almost immediately protested, and soon changed to Choo Choo Cherry and Jolly Olly Orange.
Similarly, the Frito Bandito was replaced by W.C. Fritos, but not until he’d been around for a few years.
What I’m thinking about were mainstream comics, which got away with surprisingly racist images.
Consider Detective Comics 383 from 1969:
The interior art is similar.
There’s an Adventures of Jerry Lewis 103 from 1967 in which Jerry Lewis meets Genghis Khan (Really. Well, it turns out he just thinks he’s Genghis Khan…) that is similarly embarassing today. The cover doesn’t show this, but the interior art is pretty damning. The punch line at the end is “You round-eyed guys all look alike to me!” Jerry Lewis himself doesn’t deserve any flak for this – he simply licensed his name and image to DC, and the comic book had been coming out since the early 1950s.
Green Lantern had a character named “Pieface”, who was Hal Jordan’s confidante and knew his secret identity. He was an Inuit (they called him “Eskimo”, of course), but he was colored school bus yellow, and I didn’t know “pieface” was a racial slur against mainly Asian people. I’d never heard it used before, but I knew it didn’t sound like a good thing.
http://www.thegeektwins.com/2011/05/controversy-over-hal-jordans-buddy.html
Another DC character was Chop-Chop, the Chinese member of the Blackhawk team. It bothered me that he was a.) much shorter and b.) dressed in a completely different costume than the rest of the Blackhawks. And he didn’t seem to have his own plane. Apparently his real name was Wu Cheng, but I don’t recall reading that in the omics
It’s a good thing I didn’t know how he was drawn in the earlier days – he was an outright ridiculous comic sidekick
#/media/File:Chopchop-crandall.jpg)
Then there was “Cholly” (obviously “Charlie” with the stereotypical “Chinese accent”, Mr. Magoo’s “houseboy” in some cartoons and in the syndicated comic strip:
A “Houseboy” of Asian ancestry must have been a West Coast thing, because Mr. Gregg (John Forsythe) had one on the TV show Bachelor Father
It always seemed weird to me as a kid. I didn’t know anyone who had a “houseboy”, and all of these “boys” seemed to be grown men. The term apparently originated in the British Empire for a native servant, not necessarily a boy
You can say that one of the main issues with such stereotypes is that they normalize such depictions and make them acceptable to the audiences. But what strikes me is that at least two of these cases – Chop Chop the odd Blackhawk and “houseboys” – struck me as particularly odd and definitely not normal.
