here's a Friday thought question

[flea]

What do you do about classics of children's literature that have, sometimes just incidentally, things that are racist, sexist, etc.? So far we've had to deal with this in Peter Pan (the book), which has disgustingly, to modern ears, "Ugh-How!" dialogue from the Indians. Looking ahead I see all kinds of pitfalls - "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" in the Little House books, Tintin in blackface, similar racist issues in Asterix, never mind the subtler but still problematic areas of race and class and gender in a lot of pre-1960s kids books.

Books that are both bad and racist tend no longer to be in print or available at libraries, but classics that have genuine good qualities are much tougher. Do you explain about history and people's ideas changing, and how much of that can a 5 year old take in? Assume they'll get the message from other sources in society and just let the book exist in its own universe? Sadly banish certain books from the reading list? I tried to on-the-fly tone down some of the Indian dialogue in Peter Pan (which caught me off-guard; I had either forgotten it was in the book as well as the Disney movie, or never read the book).

I mean, do I need to be worrying about class and the Sowerbys when I read Casper my beloved The Secret Garden?

What childrens' books can you think of that you love, but whose treatment of these issues doesn't stand up to scrutiny? Ideas for how to handle this?

Comments

[serrana.livejournal.com]

It's a challenge...and to be honest, this week we've been reading The Snowy Day (http://powells.com/biblio/1-9780140501827-0) and T.S. Eliot's cat poems and some stories about trains, because I do not feel able to cope just now with explanations about, We know this isn't a fair thing to say/do/act like.

Tintin is certainly the problem text around here. Herself loves it, and I let her read it, but I'm quite conscious that stuff I don't approve of comes out of it. I think that, yes, if she's going to read that, it's my job to find other images and perceptions to contrast with it.

Ultimately I think it's like picking out any other books for your kid: there are things you'll read when they're small, and things you save until they're old enough to have more resources to deal with them.

I'd say, "Well, we read this stuff and we turned out all right," except that it becomes increasingly obvious that many of us did not turn out all right at all (oh, just watching people lose it on C's YA librarianship class message board over him raising the idea, last week, that there are problems with Orson Scott Card has...confirmed for me that LJ is often a reasonably representative microcosm).

[jesseh.livejournal.com]

I have no advice, but wanted to let you know that now I have that horrifying "Ugg-a-bug-wah" song in my head.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

What's weird about Tintin is how many times it's been revised -- the one set in Saudi Arabia originally took place in British Palestine. And modern editions no longer show Tintin blowing up the rhinoceros in Tintin in the Congo. (To my relief. Who does that to a perfectly innocent rhino!)

That said, I don't think they've been revised that much.

I remember talking this over with jonquil at one point, about how some of the Just-So Stories are relatively neutral on the surface, and some are unbearable, and some others would be okay except for one or two ridic lines. (Like, in the middle of "How the Leopard Got His Spots," the man says, "I don't know, I'm only a dumb black man" or something to that effect, but otherwise acts like a perfectly reasonable protagonist.) So you just omit that line, and the story survives.

Some beloveds have definitely fallen away, over the generations. I asked Mother once if she'd read Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, a novel about a long-lived doll still popular in her generation. She remembered it with fond haziness, but never did expose us to it. (In part, I suspect, because its racism is virulent and obvious.) It was rewritten in 1999, I suppose in an attempt to delete the racism, but the Amazon reviews suggest that the people who never saw the racism in the first place didn't take that rewriting very well. (I've never read the rewritten version, and only skimmed the original.)

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

We owned a copy of Hitty. I've read it at least a couple of times, at home. Don't recall any racism - do recall exciting sea-travel adventures!

Doctor Doolittle is also problematic.

[zmayhem.livejournal.com]

I also remember loving Hitty but have no recollection whatever of any racist stuff pinging me. What was in it?

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I found a plot summary and some commentary and there are several areas that are likely to be problematic: shipwrecked and worshiped as a god by South Sea islanders, owned by a snake charmer in India, found in the Mississippi by two little black boys in the years just after the Civil War... basically, Hitty reflects mainstream white Protestant views of things circa the 19th century. So, savages, and kindly but condescending views of American blacks.

[mearagrrl.livejournal.com]

Yeahhhhh, and I think some of those are things that I would totally not even remember or think of until I was re-reading them myself. Like the Little House stuff? I don't recall that at all, but it's been a very long time since I re-read those books! I guess probably try to re-read some of them beforehand and maybe ones that are a little worse, hold off on until older/more able to explain issues.

I do recall reading some stuff on my own and not getting that it was out of touch with current values/concepts, when I was younger...and that was more just "this was written in the 1940s/50s, and this is now the 80s" stuff, so...

[fatoudust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a tough question. I know I definitely didn't ping to it at the time when I was young and reading those things. But my family's view towards race issues was somewhat different as you know. So I think for the most part, I knew I was reading about other people who felt a certain way about another group of other people.

Still, I think a certain small amount of context is possible and can be understood by even the younger kids. We did some 'splainin about MLK day before the holiday to our students, and even the youngest ones were able to grasp the basic questions of inequality.

The young have such a strong sense of justice. I think it's fine to introduce those concepts. How, is definitely tougher.

[orthoepy.livejournal.com]

I know I "edited" some of the more racist, bad-Indian stuff out of my dramatic reading of the Little House books with LB. He has and loves all the Tintin books, and we have had discussions about why those representations are neither accurate nor kind, and about what has changed and why. Kids are very sensitive to issues of "fair" so that's what we couched it as ("It's not fair to be mean to someone based on something they didn't decide for themselves, like their skin or their gender, etc. etc.")

But I can't figure out what to do about Jar-Jar. Luckily LB's nearly old enough for Jar-Jar to be shockingly uncool, and not just teeth-jarringly insensitive.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh, I was planning on simply forbidding any viewings of the newer Star Wars movies! One must draw the line somewhere!

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I will say that after reading Oyate on the Little House books, I won't read or suggest them to my kids. But we live in a city/province with a large First Nations population, so it's particularly important to me that we try to counteract the casual racism they're going to see around them.

Mostly, I'd say that talking about it instead of glossing it over is a good idea, at whatever level your kids are ready for.

[edited to correct my terms]

[zmayhem.livejournal.com]

It's been ages since I read the Little House books, but they're a perennial discussion topic in the Literary thread on b.org. The last time it was discussed, I vaguely recall the consensus being that there was a certain amount of the unconscious racism that no white person of the time could have escaped, but that overtly hateful statements like "No good Indian but a dead one" were framed in such a way that you got the feeling that definitely Laura, and possibly others in her family, did not approve.

But that's all my recollection of a discussion of a series that I haven't myself re-read in decades, so, grain of salt and all that.

Re The Secret Garden, other than Mary's nastiness to her Ayah (shown as a symptom of her general nastiness and illness) and some fuzzy Magical Brown Person thinking WRT Hindu meditation and ritual chants, there's not much to object to racially.

On class issues, Dickon and Martha and their family are all robust pastoral Mary Sues and the grimmer realities of life for the rural illiterate poor of the North Country are glossed over, but they're at least not Magical Poor Servants who exist solely to enlighten Mary and Colin; they certainly do enlighten them, but they do it in the middle of living their own lives. You always get the sense that they're all doing things, all on their own, even when they're offscreen.

As best I can recall about my own booky upbringing, nothing was ever restricted, but our mom also had a bookshelf full of narratives of the Civil Rights Era and the Holocaust and all the racially fraught histories we might need to get context for the fiction we read, and when we watched or read stuff together she pointed out the unconscious blind spots to us (or as many as she could see herself; she's since said that I had everything to do with her eventually uncovering her own unconscious sexism blind spots).

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Read this, as forodwaith suggests, for another view of Little House: http://www.oyate.org/books-to-avoid/littlehouse.html (note: it is a little hard to take, as a childhood fan of the books, and in some ways unfair (must Pa be compared to Charles Manson because daugerrotypes are bad at capturing naturalistic expressions?) but I think worth reading.)

[larisa57.livejournal.com]

That was interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with a lot of it. For instance, I thought the book made it pretty clear that they were on the land illegally, while that makes it seem like the book never mentions it. (The way that they have to leave the land at the end of the book pretty clearly states that it's because it belongs to the Indians.) I thought that a lot of Laura's descriptions that he describes as as "mocking" were much more sympathetic. And through that book and the later ones, I definitely got the impression that Ma was really terrified of the Indians, while Pa at least sort of respected them. Pa's attitude wasn't perfect by modern standards, of course, but both Laura and Pa do not agree with "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." There are lots of things in those books that could be presented differently, and I definitely do think it's a book that requires some historical context, but I don't think it's as bad as he makes it out to be.

I also thought it was kind of pointless for that article to make such a case over Pa uprooting his family so often. That's not something hidden -- it's a main theme of the books, that Pa always wants to go further west, find somewhere new, get to someplace where there aren't any people around. Laura's the same way -- she always wants to continue, and she gets really terrified when she had to go into town where there are people other than her family. It's a pretty big source of conflict between Pa and Ma, where Pa wants to keep moving and Ma wants to settle somewhere where they can have a home and the girls can go to school.

[gingerk.livejournal.com]

I have read the books many times and a good deal about Laura Ingalls, and he appears to have read entirely different books than I did. First, as flea says, the idea of deriving character from a daguerreotype of Pa Ingalls is ludicrous. Exposure took about a minute; the subject's neck was in a clamp to stay still enough. Long beards were the fashion and it wasn't fashionable to smile in a photo for another 50 years or so.

He begins by saying that Pa participated in Indian massacres, then says there's no proof, but Pa wasn't around all the time. Huh? There's also no question that Ma served as the voice of conventional society, while Laura and Pa were rebels. Pa was obviously sympathetic to the Indians and Ma's "only good Indian is a dead Indian" bothered both Laura and Pa. The descriptions of the Indians he calls "mocking" I see as her horror at their hunger.

Yes, the Ingalls were part of a pattern of taking land that was entirely unfair to the Native Americans, but from Plimouth Plantation onward, what settler was not?

[larisa57.livejournal.com]

I remember reading a lot of books that had belonged to my grandmother as a kid -- mostly Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew -- and they had a lot of questionable stuff. Usually, if I encountered something explicit that bothered me, I'd ask my mom about it, and she'd say something like, "That's what some people thought back then," and maybe tell me some relevant story from when she was a kid, like seeing the separate water fountains when traveling through the south or the girl who was valedictorian of her high school class but couldn't go to college because her family could only afford college for one kid, and her father thought that it was more important for her brother. Some of the less explicit stuff, though, I don't know.