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

[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.