If you really want a shock, going back less than a century gets you into amazing casual racism.
The internment of people Japanese descent during WWII seems like an obscure, hidden thing, but it was very obvious and visible at the time. I was surprised, upon watching the 1943 Batman serial to see tat it opens with a segment praising the US govenment’s wise decision to round up all the Japs:
While researching a turn-of-the-century amusement park, I found that, contrary to my initial assessment, they actually had African Dodgers. there. If you don’t know what the African Dodger is, have a look:
I was appalled to find that they had “African Dodgers” set up at things like church bazaars, or that local newspaper praised young girls for their accuracy in pitching balls at the Dodgers’ head. All of which is to say that throwing baseballs at the unprotected head of a black man was seen as not only perfectly natural, but actually praiseworthy.
There’s a very slight justification for people not getting completely outraged – but only a tiny bit. The balls weren’t really baseballs – they were smaller and lighter. But they were still hard balls pitched directly at someone’s head. And apparently some people brought their own “real” baseballs. Or pitched rocks. There are records of severe injuries from this.
Eventually, the practice died out. Within a decade it was outlawed in Massachusetts. Even before that, carnivals started substituting something less lethal – what we today call the Dunk Tank started out as a more humane replacement for the African Dodger. That it was originally only black people sitting on the seat of a Dunk Tank, taunting the players to throw baseballs at the target (in lieui of their head) is shown by early advertising for the tanks, which were called “chocolate drops”.
In general, otherwise decent and intelligent white people uncritically believed that blacks were degenerates only kept from erupting into savagery by the constant vigilance of our brave, noble police. :smack:
Hopefully that’s all that needs to be said or race alone would take up this entire thread.
All of this is interesting stuff. However I did expect these different attitudes, I lived through a lot of them, mostly it seemed perfectly normal at the time since it was reinforced in entertainment and current events. But it is still uncomfortable to see how long the struggle continued, and so many issues no where near resolution yet. There different attitudes now that we’ll see in the future.
For me, all the racism talk sort of veers from the original topic of the post - I don’t find racism (or sexism) in older works unexpected. Whereas the first time I heard about the total disregard for littering in older days, I was surprised.
Mad Men played with this idea, by having the characters do things that would have been normal at the time. For instance, the family goes on a picnic and then throws all the trash in the bushes (in a public park.) Or the children run into the living room playing “astronaut” with their mother’s dry cleaning bags over their heads. She flips – because they are messing with her dry cleaning. She isn’t at all concerned with them having cling-film bags on their heads. Or the time a minor character’s foot is damaged by a lawn mower. “Poor guy, he can’t work in an advertising agency any more. Oh well.”
OK, not quite on target here but something that was worth a laugh out of me when I read it.
Prentice Alvin, by Orson Scott Card (might have been the earlier Red Prophet but I’m not sure)
It’s set in the first two decades of the 1800s. One of the older women characters wants to adopt a mixed race small boy. She and her husband were abolitionists and had rescued him when his mother died getting him away from being enslaved.
So far, so good.
Arguing against adopting him, her husband says something like, “Look at him, what about when he grows up? Is he going to want to vote?”
She replied, “Oh nonsense. He wouldn’t try to vote anymore than I would!”
BOOM, baby. A book published in 1989 throwing a smackdown for the reader about how things have changed. Caught me right by surprised and made clear, to some extent, just what changes have occurred.
Just the opposite: Under the Gaslight from 1867 was the first play to have someone tied to the railroad tracks. Only it’s the hero who’s tied, and the heroine who rescues him at the last moment. And the hero puts in a plug for woman’s suffrage, too.
Phillip K Dick’s Man in the High Castle is filled with casual racism. I’d like to think he wrote it this way simply to show how bad things were in Japanese occupied California. I also wonder if anyone would be brave enough to do that now.
Fair enough. Can’t say I’ve read it. I think Stranger in a Strange Land is the only Heinlein I have read. I was in high school then, and didn’t care for it. Remember almost nothing about it now.
I think my mum travelled about 400 miles by train by herself at the age of 10 once in the 50s, being picked up at the far end. It was apparently not out of the ordinary.
I don’t think that is necessarily an accurate representation of reality. No doubt the writers were clueless men who had no idea how such conduct made women feel. It’s the reason such attitudes and such ignorance is so ubiquitous. It dominated our media for decades. We’ve grown up watching these movies convincing us that girls loved it. They probably never did. Men are only now just starting to realize it. Look how many people think girls appreciate “cat calls” as compliments. I’m sure there are plenty of movies–written by men of such mindset–who wrote their female characters to appreciate a nice compliment. Your cashier example is just one of countless examples of unacceptable conduct that was never received the way it was depicted on the screen. Remember in Revenge of the Nerds, when he pretty much rapes the girl on the Moon Walk through deception, and she fell in love with him for it? Yea, there’s no way a woman wrote that script…
Nitpick - it’s when she wants to send him to the new town school, and the school board shows up and strong-arms her into not doing so.
The book’s actually got a lot of quite nuanced portrayals of different possible responses to institutionalised racism - good, bad and kinda-sorta-maybe-good. There’s also the town drunk who “didn’t much like Black folks, but couldn’t bear to see any wild thing cooped up” and therefore becomes a staunch Underground Railway participant
I just can’t take a joke? I’m getting old? We’re more self-rightious now? For whatever reason, the joke about killing obnoxious kids doesn’t amuse me, yet I would be surprised if Cecil was actually trying to offend at the time.
I think that Heinlein in Farnham’s Freehold was trying to cast a light on real-world racism by reversing the roles, in order to make real people more sympathetic to the plight of black folks. He failed pretty spectacularly at it, but I think that’s what he was trying to do.
Which is a good segue into another one I thought of. Years ago I was reading an anthology of sci-fi/fantasy short stories that someone had given me, I think published in the 1970s. I don’t remember the title of the story and I most likely gave the book to Goodwill by now so I can’t go and check, but here’s the basic plot. The two heros were in some sort of plane crash in some sort of pseudo Middle Eastern setting (or a romanticized Western version of the Middle East, really). They wander into a village, and the village elders, I guess as a show of friendship or hospitality or whatever, offers up a nubile young woman for them to have sex with. The twist was that she turned out to have some sort of weapon hidden in her elaborate hairdo, so even though she was naked she could pull out a weapon and attack them.
Just the idea of a culture where it’s apparently the norm to show hospitality by offering strangers a young woman for their sexual pleasure reads more like some male nerd’s fantasy than any sort of plausible society.
When I saw Dennis the Menace without noticing the post you quoted I thought this was going to be about the time the cartoonist, Hank Ketchum, tried to add a black character to the strip. Except his black characters were all drawn like something out of a 19th century minstrel show, and he apparently couldn’t understand why people found that offensive.
