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]

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.