There is absolutely no reason to play one of the many yellowface episodes of Bugs Bunny on saturday morning cartoons in the 2020s. And there is potentially a lot of value in curating a couple shorts that aren’t racist and packaging those up for kids to watch.
And that is the logic by which a book might be edited to remove/replace some of the rampant racism. The value is not all the many ways Huck Finn found to give himself n-word privileges. The value is in juxtaposing the idea of growing up with understanding that the world around you might not have.
But something like… any of the works of HP Lovecraft? The racism is front and center there. So much of the idea of being “other” has to do with “racial purity” and similar insanity. And the two can’t be decoupled. Which is why it has been so effective as a backdrop for the LGBTQIA+ community (often with perspective shifts). Ignoring the inherent racism of that is just, for lack of a funnier term, whitewashing.
One thing that has stuck with me through life was a high school english course. I forget exactly what we were reading, but it was very much “Huckleberry FInn” levels of rampant racism. And the copy of the book we had specifically had like a ten page foreward about the edits that were made and why they were made. And I’ll always remember Ms Sell in front of the class looking borderline manic as she explained the racism inherent to the work. And that very much helped with my own ability to critically look at a work. Because you can’t NOT consider the inherent bad parts of work and… you often end up with that toothy rictus of a grin as you are trying to acknowledge all the heinous shit and “move past it” without actually moving past it.
The context matters a lot.
There is absolutely no reason to play one of the many yellowface episodes of Bugs Bunny on saturday morning cartoons in the 2020s. And there is potentially a lot of value in curating a couple shorts that aren’t racist and packaging those up for kids to watch.
And that is the logic by which a book might be edited to remove/replace some of the rampant racism. The value is not all the many ways Huck Finn found to give himself n-word privileges. The value is in juxtaposing the idea of growing up with understanding that the world around you might not have.
But something like… any of the works of HP Lovecraft? The racism is front and center there. So much of the idea of being “other” has to do with “racial purity” and similar insanity. And the two can’t be decoupled. Which is why it has been so effective as a backdrop for the LGBTQIA+ community (often with perspective shifts). Ignoring the inherent racism of that is just, for lack of a funnier term, whitewashing.
One thing that has stuck with me through life was a high school english course. I forget exactly what we were reading, but it was very much “Huckleberry FInn” levels of rampant racism. And the copy of the book we had specifically had like a ten page foreward about the edits that were made and why they were made. And I’ll always remember Ms Sell in front of the class looking borderline manic as she explained the racism inherent to the work. And that very much helped with my own ability to critically look at a work. Because you can’t NOT consider the inherent bad parts of work and… you often end up with that toothy rictus of a grin as you are trying to acknowledge all the heinous shit and “move past it” without actually moving past it.