Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you want to use the word that way, no one can stop you, but I don't see any daylight between what you and I are saying. A specious attack on something antiracist is necessarily racist? Because it hurts the cause? So any that defends the racist status quo is racist? Sounds like bad Marxist thought. The police are racist, so a children's book with a benign depiction of a policeman must be racist, by your way of thinking. Again, you can use the word that way if you want to, but I don't get the point. And using it that way makes it harder to distinguish between different steps on a continuum between, say, Bull Connor, Trump's July 4 speech, Matt Taibbi's review, and that children's book. They're all racist.
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Is indoctrinating kids with pro-police propaganda more racist or more fascist? Hm. Either way, there is no Paw Patrol in our house although I’ve yet to figure out what to teach Tiny about the police beyond “it’s complicated.”
Anyway, I think there’s a distinction between something written in direct response to antiracist argument and something that merely passively upholds existing systems, so don’t much care how we label the children’s book as long as we’re thinking about its message and what other messages need to be included to put it in context.
Tiny went through a Richard Scarry phase. I cringed every time through the section on the police (even though the officer eventually winds up making a bottle for his kid in the night, which seems fairly progressive for the time) and we actively tried to skip the section on the work moms do.
It’s complicated. Tiny loves Lupita Nwongo’s Sulwe, about a little girl uncomfortable with her dark skin, but I’m not sure she’s getting the right messages from it yet. She likes that it’s about sisters but prefers Day to Night.
