Most unintentionally hilarious Amazon review I've seen in a while!

[conuly]

This is a review of the book Two Little Trains by Margaret Wise Brown. Now, I haven't seen much of the original illustrations. This book has been newly illustrated for the reprinting.

It's really a cute book except for one... little... problem. You see, when Brown wrote this book originally back in 1949, she saw nothing odd about mentioning at one point that the trains hear "a black man singing in the West". And not a few reviewers thought that was a little... well... weird. I did too, actually, and most of my review is taken up with discussing this issue. (And if anybody would care to comment, I'd love to hear it. Really.)

I was concerned enough that I actually posted two images of the spread in question, to help people decide.

This is what well-meaning E. Hoffer thinks:

A good book, but needs a little white out

I was shocked to find the phrase "...of a black man singing in the west" in this book. I realize it is an older book, but shouldn't it be edited to be P.C.?? I used some white out so our copy now reads "of a man singing in the West." A good book other than that.

I know her intentions were all for the best, and it's no different from everybody else just carefully not saying That Word, but... I can't help laughing over here. Too much "black man" in your book? Just use... white out!

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

I think it's a vicious cycle. White people assume a non-racially described person is white, in part because when they describe white people they don't mention race and when they describe other people they do. I think reinforcing that is a problem. Since there is a picture, this is actually a great place to violate that - leave out race and have the person not be white.

However, I wonder if what tends to happen is that it's a part of the larger tendency for people to assume that non-described people are more like them. This isn't exactly racist. For example, I often notice how when I'm at a multi-age gathering, people tend to guess the ages of others to be closer to whatever their age is. I do not know if people of a minority race tend to imagine a racially undefined character as more likely to be their own race or the race of the majority where they are.

I do know that from the review, it seems the man is the man in the moon, which struck me as very interesting. I tried to see if there were any stories about the man in the moon that gave extra context. Describing a character with a descriptor that is a reference to an attribute a special character has that hints at the character not just being a regular human feels very fairy-taleish to me, and made me wonder if there was hidden context here. But I could find none. The race of the man in the moon (or woman or girl or boy, depending on the culture for cultures where there is a human in the moon as opposed to a hare or some other such thing) doesn't seem to be specified, so it seems to go along with whichever culture the story is from.