I mean examples that took you by surprise. Maybe the characters, too, if you feel like it.
I noticed that “The Marching Morons” by Cyril Kornbluth was being given away by Amazon to Prime Members, so I started reading it. It’s kind of a Rip Van Winkle story.
Anyway after our Rip wakes up and starts doing some things with the government, he meets a fellow with an African last name. (He’s half). Immediately he asks if he can be assigned to someone else. I mean, he’s got nothing against “Negroes”, and some of his best friends are black! But you know, if it would be OK…
Not only do they allow this but the half-black guy takes with with aplomb and equinamity. Well, this is a book in which race hasn’t even been a remote issue up until now. In a complicated way, it’s sort of a book about haves and have-nots, and I was kind of taken aback by this incident - it seemed kind of forced to say the least. Like “Oh, we’d better give our Rip some characterization, let’s make him racist.”
Other examples of where racism seems to be unneccesarily inserted into books? Spoiler tags are not necessary (unless the book has been released in the last year, please).
“The Call of Cthulhu” by HP Lovecraft. The way he refers to the men that worship Cthulhu as “degenerate” and “mentally aberrant…negroes and mulattoes” was completely unnecessary and jarring. I couldn’t even finish the story after reading that part.
Then there was the story where he had a cat named "Nigger Man’’.
In this case, it was justified. It’s an important window into how Barlow thinks – he is, after all, a sociopath. The racism was a hint of things to come and I’m sure that Kornbluth had the parallel between Barlow’s solution and Hitler’s one very strongly in mind. Barlow is not a figure to be admired.
You can find this sort of things in plenty of books written prior to the 1950s, especially genre fiction.
Three Men in a Boat is actually a very funny book but the racist passages took me out of it. I understand it was written in 1889 and for it’s day it was nothing exceptional but it detracted from the experience for me and really added nothing to the book.
I came in here to mention Niggerman in “The Rats in the Walls,” which is otherwise a supremely awesome story. Lovecraft was pretty damn racist in his early days of writing. Check out “The Horror at Red Hook” for even more racism woven into the story, and if you really want to see the nadir of both writing talent and racial enlightenment, check out “The Street.” I do hear that he somewhat reformed his views later on at least.
I already started getting that idea, actually, without the added racism. It was like the author was subtly telling you how Barlow was; and then WHAM! Anvil on the head! It lost all the smoothness.
BTW, I don’t know what the “solution” was. I asked for no spoiler tags, and I’ll have finished the story by tonight, so if we could just refrain from posting the solution until later tonight I’d appreciate it.
No one should be surprised by racism in any book written prior to World War II and only mildly surprised by any written between then and the 1960s. You can assume that every fictional character from the period is a racist, even if he does or says nothing to show it. All it means is that there didn’t happen to be any blacks or asians around to be racist at.
I had an old Hardy Boys book when I was a kid where the main plot was about the “yellow menace.” The Bobbsey Twins made raucous fun of their black mammy’s hair on the train ride to New York City. Dashiell Hammet’s Continental Op faced off against inscrutable chinamen and Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe had little nice to say about either the black or latino population of Los Angeles. Tintin in the Congo? Hell, Agatha Christie wrote a book called Ten Little Niggers.
No surprises, and this rarely takes me out of the story because I’m aware of when the story is set. I do often find myself bemused at the 21st century sensibilities and political correctness applied to characters in historical fiction however.
When I was a kid in the 70’s I used to read Bobbsey Twins books. I had the purple-spine editions which were mostly published in the 60s and they had a very stereotypical “Mammy”-type housekeeper, and a black hired hand (her husband). They seemed inappropriate enough at the time, but when I got older and found some original editions from the teens and twenties I was shocked - they had really modernized those characters even for the 60s editions.
Ok, I’m not going to say that I was surprised to read racist passages in a William Faulkner story, but I thought I’d mention it because it was so over the top shocking.
I don’t remember the name of the story, I read it in an omnibus of Yoknapatawpha shorts many years ago.
The story begins as two “Red men” (Native Americans, natch) are discussing the recently arriving “White Men” and the curious practice of bringing “Black Men” with them. The N.A.'s talk about how sad it is to see how poorly the White Men treat the Black Men who work for them. They agree that the conditions that Black Men are forced to endure are inhumane. So, you think the Red Men are exhibiting some sympathy for the Blacks, but then the conversation takes a bizarre left turn. (Paraphrasing here):
Native American #1: And those Black Men…they don’t taste very good either.
N.A. #2: Oh yeah, their flesh is so tough and stringy. Horrible.
N.A. #1: Would you believe that the White Men will trade a whole horse for just ONE Black Man??
N.A. #2: Silly White Men…how stupid.
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
I had to re-read that exchange like five times in a row to get over the surprise of reading this. And I do believe that Faulkner meant it humorously.
Oh, I know some mothers who are ripshit over the depiction of Native Americans in the Little House books, not to mention the fact that Pa took part in a blackface show or something. Honestly, I have trouble getting worked up about that stuff. The books are from the point of view of the white settlers of the time, period. They may have been socio-politically wrong to settle on Natives’ land, but the point of the story is whatever the background, Ma and the girls were scared out of their minds when a couple Indian men showed up at their door and demanded food. That was their subjective experience, and that’s what the book tries to convey.
This might be a good time to mention also that racist depictions in children’s entertainment probably doesn’t influence children towards racism. I look at things I used to watch sometimes and I’m duly horrified as an adult with a full appreciation of history and race relations, but as a kid I had no context for any of that, and tended to just accept the individual characters as silly, not as meant to represent their whole race.
I had read a very interesting book of stories about sport fishing. One from the 1930s covered marlin fishing off the Florida Keys.
It threw me for a moment when a character quite matter-of-factly referred to coral outcroppings as “niggerheads.”
The unquestioned casual racism of the past should not be ignored.
QUOTE=Stauderhorse;14851360]“The Call of Cthulhu” by HP Lovecraft. The way he refers to the men that worship Cthulhu as “degenerate” and “mentally aberrant…negroes and mulattoes” was completely unnecessary and jarring. I couldn’t even finish the story after reading that part.
Then there was the story where he had a cat named "Nigger Man’’.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, Lovecraft was very well-known for that - even by the standards of the day, he was something of an ass. Oddly, he was also a virulent anti-semite - and his wife was Jewish. One imagines that he slept on the couch a lot.
I remember some Conan stories shocking me, I don’t know honestly but it seemed out of place somehow.
One odd place you can find some is the rather inoffensive Donald and Scrooge McDuck comics, for the reprints it makes sense as a lot of the Carl Barks stories were written in a different time, Don Rosa attempted to address some of this in his tribute series but his depictions are looking iffy even ten years later(and so in a universe of ducks and other anthropomorphized animals Africans look human?!?) but a lot comes off as not politically correct rather than hateful.
There’s the well-publicized issue with the dog named “Nigger” in The Dam Busters. It’s complicated by the fact that the movie is based on a true story, and that was the name of the dog.
A past thread I started was about the surprising racism in The Bobsey Twins. Times have definitely changed.
Just today I listened to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Statement of J. Habakuk Jephson on audio – and was blown away. I knew that this was a fictionalized answer to the disappearance of the passenger on the Mary Celeste (he called it the Marie Celeste, probably to emphasize its fictional nature), but I didn’t realize that the explanation he gave was a race war – the blacks on board, under the leadership of a mulatto, take over the ship and sail it to Africa. Doyle comes off as pretty even-handed in his other stories, so I wasn’t expecting a story with vengeful savage superstitious blacks.
the same mantle of race war showed up in writers like Robert E,. Howard later on. In the form of “yellow peril” it had a lot of practitioners.
I’m not merely surprised by there being racism in the book. I specifically mean examples where the mention of it itself is surprising; where there hasn’t been any addressing it and no need to address it and suddenly its dropped in.
Like The Marching Morons (which I just finished over my lunch break, btw). I got the idea he was a sociopath already all by my wee self. The moment of him being racist was jarring and isn’t really ever mentioned again.
I found an old copy of Betty MacDonald’s Onions in the Stew at a book exchange party and thought I might enjoy it, since I remembered reading my grandmothers’ copy of The Egg and I as a kid and thinking it was pretty funny.
I couldn’t get past the casual bigotry about dirty, drunken Indians in the first few chapters. If it had only been one passing comment, I might have overlooked it, but they just kept coming.
I was actually surprised how anti-racist some of the Holmes stories were, given the time. Apparently Doyle’s racial views evolved a lot over his life time. He was ships doctor on a voyage with Henry Garnet who apparently went some way towards changing his previous prejudices. By the end of his life he was advocating against colonial abuses in the Congo.