This childrens book was popular for generations:
Lots of editions, too, like this pop-up version:
It is no longer available to children in school libraries.
Why isn’t that - and LOTS of other examples - upsetting.
Surely, one can explain the context to kids, right?
How about Disney’s Song of the South? Watched that one lately? Why not?
We move on and try to improve. We edit cultural works all of the time, for example by removing statues of persons for whom the judgment of history has been unfavorable.
The language itself evolves and moves on. I don’t know if the Flintstones are still in syndication, but I’d be surprised if they were still having “a gay old time”.
There are a lot of childrens books that have become irrelevant, obsolete or backwards.
I do not share the conceit that my childhood was somehow the pinnacle of civilization.
We evolve.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Sambo
As one in a series of small-format books called The Dumpy Books for Children, the story was popular for more than half a century.
Critics of the time observed that Bannerman presents one of the first black heroes in children's literature and regarded the book as positively portraying black characters in both the text and pictures, especially in comparison to books of that era that depicted black people as simple and uncivilised. However, it became an object of allegations of racism in the mid-20th century due to the names of the characters being racial slurs for dark-skinned people, and the fact that the illustrations were, as Langston Hughes expressed it, in the pickaninny style.
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Go try that out on a classroom and “explain the context” to the torchbearing mob the next day.
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