Little Black Sambo and the sentimental heart of White Supremacy: or, Roald Dahl and bookburners against bookburning

 The pseudo-controversy about editing Roald Dahl's books to suppress bigoted material for the woke crowd - just one incident in the history of the slice n dice of Dahl's books, which nobody seems to have ever objected to before (the Ladybird edition of Charlie and the Chocolate factory book, for instance, trims the 180 pages down to 48 for young readers. The horror!) reminds me of the suburban Atlanta of my youth - back in the wondrous 60s, when the civil rights era was upsetting all the verities! Back then, the suburban white crowd was upset about the censorship of everybody's fave classic, Little Black Sambo. How could one deny white kids and even the colored kids such a wondrous comic classic? That and a couple of lynching postcards, and you would have a fine breath of the American mind.

The banning of Little Black Sambo was probably told to little future Fox News figures as a horror story: surely it was the Jews and the liberals that did it! Looking around for that history, I found out it started - aha! - in Canada.

"Is The Story of Little Black Sambo, the children’s book written and illustrated by Helen Bannerman in 1899, the fantastical tale of a heroic boy who faces danger courageously, outwitting tigers and being rewarded with pancakes? Or is it a prejudiced story whose caricaturized illustrations of blacks had invidious and hurtful effects on generations of black children? That was the question faced by the Toronto Board of Education in 1955 when a concerned parent objected to Sambo‘s presence in his son’s school. The ensuing debate prompted a furor across North America."

The north American nations, founded on a pretty rigid system of racism, but with democratic appurtenances, are prone to these fights. If there is one field that the white supremicist impulse holds dear, it is its popular culture, from Aunt Jemima to Buckwheat.

It rather warms my heart that at the beginning of the fight over Little Black Sambo, the proto-woke opponent was an open communist - a woman named Edna Ryerrson. The Cold War liberal version of Communism was that Communists were just entrapping and using black people - not like the Cold War liberals, who was all about gradual change and equality in, perhaps, 2100.

Edna Ryerson urged that a committee report on the book. A committee did, and saw - of course - that free speech and childhood joy would be impeded by any block to its circulation of being assigned in class:

"The resulting report written by Phimister and Director of Education C.C. Goldring and tabled on January 6, 1956 was dismissive of Braithwaite’s concerns {Braithwaite was the black parent who had complained to Ryerson]. “It is felt that it is unwise to ban from the Public Schools a book which has such a wide appeal for children,” it concluded, “and which cannot be said to be discriminatory in that it is a children’s fantasy which portrays a little negro boy who has a great adventure in the jungle, from which he emerges successfully.” Newspaper coverage of this initial debate likewise denied any legitimacy to Braithwaite’s claims, dismissing the very idea of racial intolerance in Toronto as Communist rabble-rousing."

The woke have, of course, taken the place of the Communists. It is almost as if there were a structural and systematic defense of white supremacy that we can detect here. But shucks, that can't be true!

The debate about the book could be transported to Florida today, and it would seem like just another news item about the important work De Santis is doing in de-trumpizing the GOP and making it a wonderful party once again!

"A fiery, 90-minute debate followed, with Ryerson’s attempts to speak repeatedly cut off by the chairman. “I am somewhat tired of you making political issues out of racial issues,” chairman D.M. Morton loudly declared to the Communist trustee.

“This is book-burning,” superintendent Phimister declared, warning his colleagues that they’d be setting themselves on a dangerous path “along the same lines as book-burning and censoring to which there is no end.” He added: “‘Sensitivity to the word Sambo is in the minds of the minority and not of the majority. The word Sambo doesn’t mean anything bad to me.” Another trustee added that his own children loved the story and they’d “never thought of it as prejudicial to any race.” Another conceded that the book should be removed, but only from specific schools where it was perceived to cause offense."

This is a regular candybox of rightwing and centrist canards. I especially like the mention of book burning by the same people who would turn around and ban any book that criticized in any way the racism of the "majority" - that would be considered, at the time, just communistic, and in our time, as too woke. Can't have that! And so it is that the bookburners decry bookburning and their children see Sambo as an adorable object. The beat goes on and on in the moronic inferno.

Police and the "whitening" of Americans

There is an important, but under-discussed part of police history is that is also the history of the "whitening" of immigrant groups that came to the United States.

In the early 19th century, American cities didn't have police departments. Boston was one of the first. At the same time that Boston was constructing a police department specifically to control the less well off or immigrant areas in town, New England and America in general was receiving an enormous influx of Catholic Irish, fleeing the famine and oppression. Famously, what they met on the white Protestant shores of the New World was, at first, No Irish need apply signs. The Irish were considered sub-English - in England especially, but as well in the U.S. Although Germans were also migrating, on the whole, they were protestant. The combination of religious prejudice plus the aura of prejudice against the Irish in England put them into the class of the "not-quite white".

In the U.S., the rituals of becoming white have been explored for the last twenty years by many scholars. Here's an overview of the field.

What interests me is the way police work acted as a vector into whiteness, partly because police work allowed for the direct targeting of black subjects. To become white in the white settler state, a common strategy was to distance oneself from, and stigmatize, black people.
I'm not aware of any borrowing in this field from Rene Girard's theory of negative mimesis. In simple terms, Girard hypothesizes that the social order is built around a fundamental violence: the targeting and expulsion of a scapegoat. In order to not be the scapegoat, one engages in negative mimeses - trying to become the scapegoat's Other.

I have many criticisms of Girard's total explanation of the social order, but the scapegoating and negative mimesis process does work well with the becoming-white of various ethnic groups - the Irish and the Italian-Americans in particular - and the way that policing played a symbolically central role. One that carries over today. The police enact the neurosis of whiteness, to put it in sharp and exaggerated terms.