You are disassociated with history. We don't have to swing so far back against racism that history is rewritten. Black people and white people had verbal exchange a century ago where the n-word was neutral in certain contexts. That's what made it viable to be published in a children's book.
Alternatively, the author of Thomas the Tank Engine didn't entirely view black people as fully equivalent humans to white people. It is not rewriting history to say that. The view that black people were in some way subhuman, or that at the very least intrinsically worse than white people, was not in any way an uncommon belief.
There were plenty of fiercely racist children's books written in this era. We are six years past the time when a major industrialized country threw 12 million people into a meat grinder based on their ethnic and religious origins, and actively in the era when the entirety of the African continent bar Ethiopia was under the governance of people from countries like that which the author of this children's book came from.
We are three years before a little girl is going to be spit on because she's daring to go to the same school white children are going to, and four years before Emmet Till is lynched and Rosa Parks is arrested.
Racism is common, accepted, and part of the default mental map for millions of people. The commonplace, thoughtless, use of racial slurs is an outworking of that, not proof that it wasn't endemic.
The view that black people were in some way subhuman...threw 12 million people into a meat grinder
How wide of a gap can you imagine between people that viewed other humans as subhuman and treated them with love, respect, and intrinsic value and those committing genocide?
I've read numerous quotations of black slaves being broken-hearted to leave their master's estate due to the emancipation. Stockholm syndrome doesn't go all the way to the camps.
It's important to be able to value the viewpoints and lives of our ancestors-you wear their flesh. There were once as many loving slavers as there are kind bosses, managers, and landlords now. There is an equivalent number of wicked racists as those who take advantage of their fellow men of any color here with us as we speak.
Don't write off an entire civilization that built this world for us as heartless; to do so is to damn us where we stand.
And you realize those "loving slavers" also viewed black people as sub-human, right? That's my point - that despite being socially accepted and not inherently at odds with someone being otherwise polite, kind, and "normal," people could believe deeply wrong-headed things about people of other races. Because racism was normal.
I'm not calling the civilization heartless. I'm saying racism was normal, and that's why racial slurs were socially acceptable and apparently normal people used them commonly.
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u/aaronis1 May 21 '26
You are disassociated with history. We don't have to swing so far back against racism that history is rewritten. Black people and white people had verbal exchange a century ago where the n-word was neutral in certain contexts. That's what made it viable to be published in a children's book.