Historical Imagination (was Re: J.K. Rowling's fav books)

[Ebony AKA AngieJ]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., tabouli at u... wrote:
> "The Little White Horse" is lovely, though given the frequent 
racial discussions on this and the main list, I warn you that the 
Black Men are the bad guys in the story, and "blackness" in general 
gets a bit of a bad press.

LOL!  We really don't talk about race and ethnicity all the time on 
these groups, quite the contrary... this sort of thing comes and 
goes, just like shipping, Number of Hogwarts Students, and Snape-is-a-
vampire.  ;-)  

The connotation of black/dark=bad is found in most English-language 
stories... don't know about other languages.  I do a lot of reading 
by writers from the African Diaspora, and I quite enjoy it, but if 
that's all I ever read I think I'd be unbalanced.  (Although I am 
glad that I grew up in a time when I could read Ezra Jack Keats, 
Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, and Mildred Taylor along with 
my steady diet of Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Madeleine L'Engle, and 
Katherine Patterson.)

> I tend to take the "read it in the context of the values of the 
time"  view on these issues.  I confess (she says, conscious that 
she's wading in perilous waters here) to a certain irritation with 
people> who loudly denounce works written decades ago for not 
upholding > current values regarding feminism, multiculturalism and 
so forth.  I > mean, sure, note that the attitudes expressed in the 
books would be > considered sexist, or racist, or whatever by today's 
standards, but > don't denounce the writers for not anticipating 
shifts in values > which occurred 50 years after their time.  Please.
>

Thank you!  Isn't this called "historical imagination"?  At least, 
that's what my AP American History teacher told us on the first day 
of class back in '93--she was white, we were a very racially mixed 
group who found the majority of the first 2/3s of our textbooks 
offensive.  So she made what you said, Tabouli, her very first 
lesson.  It worked... we had lots of fun in her course, for she was 
an *excellent* teacher.  

Hmm.  There's a pretty bad racial slur on the last page of what might 
have been one of my favorite Lucy Maud Montgomery books.  I still own 
the book, but I must confess I've never re-read it... it spoiled the 
entire novel for me.  My historical imagination is woefully deficient-
-I *always* get extremely angry when watching movies about black 
history (I cried and threw things all evening after 
watching "Rosewood"--my roots are in Florida)--so I think I agree 
with the spirit of "read it in the context of the values of the time" 
more than I do the letter.  A bigot in 1701, 1801, and 1901 pisses me 
off just as much as a bigot in 2001.

But some people go too far IMO.  My best friend from middle school, 
who is biracial, told us one day when we were in sixth grade that her 
parents TOSSED OUT her Little House on the Prairie series when they 
found out about the minstrel show.  Never mind that minstrelsy is 
part of America's cultural history... no study of the development of 
the American theatre is complete without touching upon it.  Never 
mind that the doctor who helped save Laura's family when they were 
sick in Indian Territory was a black man... and LIW wrote this detail 
in long before it was "PC" to do so.  

I think I agree with you, Tabouli.  I'd rather my children read about 
the past and understand both its glory and its sordidness, than to 
grow up ignorant of the trends that have influenced where we are at 
this point in history.

--Ebony AKA AngieJ