Does the show Dukes of Hazzard encourage racism?

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41. My kids loved that show when they were preschoolers

The older one had a Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox and a Dukes of Hazzard big wheels. When the younger one was learning to talk, many of his first words were things like "Dukes car" and variations thereof.

So there's no doubt that little kids love it -- and I never saw much likelihood of my own kids picking up racist attitudes from it. The show also had an anti-authoritarian streak that I found healthy.

My main reservation about it would be that it papers over the actual facts of racism in the Deep South. But I think kids learn very early that a lot of the stories aimed at them leave out the more violent and brutal parts of history and current events.

If you're concerned, you can always say to them something like, "You realize this is kind of a fairy tale, don't you, and that cars can't really zoom through the air like that and that a real Boss Hogg would be a whole lot meaner?" And they will say, as my kids used to, "Of course, I know this isn't real."

I'd also add that when I was a kid, I read a lot of children's classics written between, say, 1900 and 1940, that included overt racism and never noticed it. When you're a kid, you just accept certain stereotypes, like jungle savages or wild Indians, as conventional story tropes and don't ever think to relate them to your own experience of people and events -- especially when you're aware that the book is an old one and that people when it was written didn't have the advantage of our present-day knowledge of the world.