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

[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!