Re-Reading Racism

I have spent the past week and a bit more or less unable to write—more specifically, unable to type, thanks to retinal surgery—and so to occupy my time I've been reading.

Title page of the novel Kim,
from Wikimedia Commons

Well, okay, I am always reading, spending easily as much time reading as I do writing. But in this case I've very specifically been reading old novels and stories (following up my journey into Dumas the elder), from the period of the 1880s and 1890s into the first two decades of the twentieth century: titles such as Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, The Wrong Box (Stevenson); The Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau (Hope); Kim (Kipling); The Riddle of the Sands (Childers); and Valmouth, Santal, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (Firbank). Most of these books I had never read before; all save for the Firbank novels (which truly are uncategorizable) are adventure stories.

And, alas, all are full of incidents of what I'll call casual racism. (And dear lord, don't even ask about the misogyny...)



The Guardian has, coincidentally, featured the 1938 novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day as its September. And guess what? In the midst of a mostly charming and lively story about a downtrodden woman learning to be a bit less so, are appalling moments of  casual racism, racism I really hope Winifred Watson herself didn't notice herself perpetrating*. (Not that this is any excuse, I suppose.)

So how do I deal with these books? For the most part I enjoyed them a lot, in some cases (Black Arrow) much more so than I'd expected to. (Rupert of Hentzau I could have done without.) In most cases the racism truly is incidental; the weirdest bit by far comes in Riddle of the Sands, where Childers has one of his characters use the n-word... in a compliment to Kaiser Wilhelm II. (No, I'm not going to repeat it.) None of these novels comes anywhere near to Thomas Dixon, Jr. in terms of foulness. Same goes for Miss Pettigrew.

Everyone ought to be allowed their own tipping point, I guess: I would never for a moment suggest anyone read anything that might contain something said person would find offensive. (This is going to seriously limit these peoples' reading choices, but c'est la vie.) But I think it behooves us to keep in mind two things: one, that if we shut ourselves off from anything that might conceivably be considered racist we shut ourselves off from most writing on the previous century and pretty much everything from the centuries before that, to our immense loss; and two, that if we willfully ignore such negative behaviour we paradoxically make ourselves more vulnerable to a rebirth of it.

For myself, I believe I will continue to stumble on as I have been, enjoying the unexpected delights of R. L. Stevenson's humour in The Wrong Box and pausing briefly to condemn momentary bits of antisemitism; likewise I will continue to avoid the works of T. Dixon, because very little judgment is required on that score. I have a lot of potentially interesting books I've never looked at. I think it's past time I paid them more attention.

*Miss Pettigrew is one of the rare instances in which I much prefer the movie version of a story to its novel original, and the racism is one of the reasons, though not the only one.