Many of Shakespeare's plays have fallen under suspicion, but in , a school in New Hampshire removed this comedy because of the cross-dressing and the allusion to same-sex romance which actually doesn't happen in the narrative — which they saw as breaking the school's rule on "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction. You can now buy Twelfth Night on Amazon. Even this beloved children's classic about the friendship between barn animals, a spider, and a young girl faced censure.
A parents' group from Kansas had the book removed from classrooms. Because, they claimed, talking animals even if they never spoke with the human characters were clearly the work of the devil, and imbuing animal characters with human traits was "sacrilegious. You can now buy Charlotte's Web on Amazon. After writing this, Steinbeck was attacked from both sides of the political spectrum for how he portrayed California farmers and migrant workers of the Depression.
Some saw his book as communist propaganda and took issue with how Steinbeck characterized the farmers and their attitudes towards migrant workers. You can now buy The Grapes of Wrath on Amazon.
In what was perhaps the most ridiculous reasoning behind banning a children's book about a bear, this book made the banned list in Texas in Because Bill Martin, Sr. But no one checked to see if the Bills were the same person. They were not. This story about a hapless young donkey who finds a magical, wish-granting pebble wasn't banned for its references to magic, but rather for the illustrations.
Police departments and school districts took issue with the police characters being drawn as anthropomorphic pigs, even though pig characters of various occupations were also portrayed. You can now buy Sylvester and the Magic Pebble from Amazon. Despite how ubiquitous this series was, there were some who were less than thrilled with the story's focus on magic, and the words "witchcraft and wizardry" spooked a number of parents, as well. A Catholic school pulled all seven of the books in , citing the magical aspects of the story inappropriate for their students.
You can now buy the Harry Potter series on Amazon. Believe it or not, this has happened several times to both the American Heritage and the Merriam Webster. A school board moved to ban it from classrooms because it included a definition for "oral sex," and one in Alaska for including the racy slang definitions for words like "bed" and "knockers.
Plenty of other books, many of them now considered classics and staples of any library, have been banned for a variety of reasons throughout history, but it usually just makes them come back even more popular. While Burroughs writes some female characters with humanistic equalizing elements, it is commonly argued that violent scenes against women in the context of male sociopolitical domination are condoned in his writing, underpinning a notion of gendered hierarchy where patriarchy is the natural highpoint of society.
However, Burroughs notion of the feminine elevated women to the same level as men and that- in such characters as Dian or Dejah Thoris- portrays a female type who is neither desperate housewife nor full-lipped prom-date, and neither middle-level office-manager nor frowning ideological feminist-professor, but those who exceed all these in her realized humanity and in so doing suggests how ridiculous such views were to begin with. It has been suggested- and supported in various experiments and real-world examples- that when we are removed from our modern world of convenience and elevated sense of civilization we revert to primal instincts and behaviors.
Once again, adults- who have forgotten and forsaken their childhood imaginations and innocence- look with a magnifying glass at these tales with a larger world-view than is needed for them. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. About R. Wolf Baldassarro Articles. Wolf Baldassarro is an American poet, writer, and columnist.
It was common for children with parents from the Caribbean to watch a Tarzan jungle scene where black people were shown as cowardly, stupid and wicked to then ask their parents "Is that where you come from? Racism permeates all the Tarzan spin offs as they always portray black people in a negative manner.
The only possible exception is George of the Jungle starring Brendan Fraser, where black people were given some of the best lines and turned the stereotypes upside down.
In , Disney decided to re-invent Tarzan as an animated movie with Tony Goldwyn as the voice of Tarzan. Disney consulted the source material and had a problem - how would they deal with the racist portrayal of black people in the original literature? Their solution was simple; remove all black people from the story. Even though Tarzan is set in Africa, if you watch the film you will see lions, elephants, giraffe, hippos, crocodiles, but not one single African person.
The white bias is blatant. They were more concerned with giving character to the animals than the African people. A simple solution to the racist problem would have been to make both Tarzan and Jane black, but clearly this was too complicated as they would then have to create adventure and love scenes for an African couple set in Africa, and when has Disney ever done that in its nearly year-old history?
The much-lauded Lion King could easily have also been done with a full cast of animated African people but that did not happen. Why not? Ari Handel, the writer of the blockbuster Noah , justified why there are no black people in his film by saying, "From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race. What we realised is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the race of the individuals doesn't matter.
Either you end up with a Benetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Evidently white people represent the entire planet. It was noticeable that Queen La, Tarzan's enemy, despite her white hair and green eyes, has a different and darker skin colour to Tarzans.
Queen La's evil troops are called The Leopard Men and are portrayed as non-human. It took until for Disney to green light a movie with a black lead, The Princess and the Frog, but again they refused to endorse a loving black couple.
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