Yeah, if you read Australian recipes, you’ll find that the word has been deprecated in favor of “makrut” for the most part. I’m not sure when this started happening, but it’s how I became aware of the problematic nomenclature, maybe around a decade or so ago.
Like here’s a typical recipe from an Australian recipe site. Notice “makrut lime leaves” under the ingredients. I have seen that terminology used in the US, as well, but it’s not as common as in Australian and New Zealand sites yet. Though I did just check a random recipe on Epicurious.com and it did call for “makrut lime leaves.” Same with Serious Eats. So maybe US food nomenclature is catching up. Before, I only noticed recipes from Australasia favoring “makrut.”
I picked up on it from, of all things, the film Lethal Weapon II back in 1989. It was the age of international sanctions on South Africa and ‘free Nelson Mandela’ while simultaneously being the era of glasnost with Gorbachev in the USSR. So some bright screenwriter thought “maybe instead of Russians we can use racist white South Africans as the perfect international villains!” So the word got slung around several times and I had to ask somebody what the obvious slur they were using actually meant.
Similarly, the American chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bars known to generations as Eskimo Pies are now Edy’s Pies, in honor of one of the manufacturer’s founders.
I hear about Eskimo-Aleut languages all the time, relatively speaking, but, when it comes to individual peoples and culture, the wisdom is not to mix up Yupik, Sirenik, Inuit, and (especially non-Eskimos like) Aleut, Chukchi et al as if they were all the same thing.
Worth noting is that the book Mary Poppins originally had a god-awful chapter involving a compass, in which the children went to various parts of the world (say “East” and you go to China, “South” and you’re in Africa," etc.). The chapter was filled with nasty racist stereotypes, including an African Black woman who spoke in cringeworthy dialect. In the sixties or seventies, not sure when, the publisher told P. L. Travers that it was necessary to replace the chapter to remove the racist depictions (talking polar bears instead of the people of the Arctic, that kind of thing). Travers refused, saying that “the little black children” liked that part of the book the best (I’m sure they did), but changed her mind when the publisher said they’d have to stop selling the book if she didn’t get with the program.
Not to defend Disney for the Admiral Boom line, but the book chapter is appallingly awful and things could’ve been a heck of a lot worse.
And since someone(s) referenced Oz, worth noting is that Rinkitink in Oz mentions either a “Hottentot” or possibly a “Tottenhot,” I don’t recall for sure, which is described as being “somewhat lower than a man” and is accompanied by one of the most offensive illustrations John R. Neill ever drew. I’m not sure if this was ever changed. I considered doing it as a read-aloud for my elementary school class some years ago, but had forgotten the Tottenhot thing–when I saw the picture I said uh-uh. Too bad, as much of the book is actually quite good.
The Disney film was originally going to include a sequence based on this chapter, but it was scrapped. They ended up reusing two of the four songs the Sherman Brothers had written for it: “The Beautiful Briny” (in Bedknobs and Broomsticks) and “The Land of Sand” (as the melody for “Trust in Me” in The Jungle Book).
Since the book is readily available online (Project Gutenberg) I looked it up and found the part you’re talking about.
I have no idea whether there are alternate versions, but in this version, the word is indeed “tottenhot” and, interestingly, the tottenhot is the one creature mentioned who is not pictured in the illustration. (The “mifket” is pictured, and is humanoid but, as far as I can tell, is not intended to resemble any real-world humans.)
IMHO there’s nothing there that crosses the line into actual racism, but it maybe comes too close to that line for modern sensibilities. In particular, one could plead that the idea of a “lower form of a man” could perfectly well exist in a fantasy world, but in our real world, it’s a racist concept.
There was such an illustration in the original. You can see it here:
(It’s perhaps not quite as awful as I recalled, but it’s still pretty bad)
There’s a discussion about the removal of the picture in the Oz wiki:
“More recently, Books of Wonder and their publishing partners have been criticized by some for altering two of its reprints of Baum’s books. The original versions contained depictions that were seen as amusing in Baum’s day, but the times have changed, and they are now seen as offensive African or African-American stereotypes. In The Patchwork Girl of Oz , there is a living phonograph that plays a song that originally contained the line, “Ah wants mah Lulu, mah coal-black Lulu;” this was changed to, “Ah want my Lulu, mah cross-eyed Lulu” by Books of Wonder. A later, similar line not only kept the change from coal-black to cross-eyed, it changes loves to the more grammatically correct love. Later in the same book, the travelers meet a band of people called Tottenhots, an obvious play on the Hottentot peoples of South Africa. Some references to these people’s dusky skin color and other aspects of their appearance were edited or removed, and one picture of a Tottenhot was not included. In Rinkitink in Oz , another picture of a Tottenhot was removed. Both pictures unflatteringly showed the Tottenhots as stereotypical “savage” Africans.”
Apparently so! I was a bit surprised at first, because the Gutenberg version looks original, but I was sure I did not have a false memory of the image…