conuly

In the foreward to Sam and the Tigers, the author and illustrator state that they looked through over 50 versions of Little Black Sambo when doing research for their own book. Clearly, having differing versions of a story, with different illustrations (and possibly different text) was the norm for Bannerman's time, and so the "just swap out the names" versions aren't really censorship, are they? (If they are, which version, exactly, are they censoring?)

And the "whole new story based on the old one" mode... I don't think that's censorship either - no more than I think it's censorship when I read one book which sets Cinderella as a Chinese girl and another which puts her as a (male) cowboy and a third which tells the story of CinderEdna who worked for all her "luck". It's just different storytellers telling stories through different lenses. Spin the kaleidoscope again and something else new will come up, but it's still the same object, right?

Even if I did object to this in principle (which I don't), I'm still not sure I'd call it censorship. The racism in Little Black Sambo was, I believe, accidental. I really doubt that Bannerman meant to put it there, and the story stands just fine without it. The misogyny in certain songs can hardly be said to be an accident (although the artist in question might not be thinking too deeply about it), and the song would be very changed by removing it - it's hardly a superficial difference.

Of course, if one artist released two different versions of the same song, one schools and one for grown-ups... that's not censorship either. People do that all the time - they have the original version, and the version that's on THIS CD, and the version that's on THAT CD, and the longer version, and (if they get that far) a couple hundred parody versions all over YouTube. So long as we're able to find, should we want, every version (even the offensive versions), and aren't denied that they exist, I don't see it as censorship even in the broad definition (which includes censorship by non-governmental bodies).

And you *can* buy copies of "the original" (whichever version that is) Little Black Sambo. You can even download them online, cuz it's open source by now. It's not just freely available, it's actually free, which is about as non-censored as you can get.