The Un-Man Speaks

Surely you’ve heard: a week or two ago, Tintin books were almost banned from the shelves of a Stockholm library, the Kulturhuset, on the ground that they are racist.  In fact, about 10% of Swedish libraries already exclude Tintin as being racist.  (The ban in the Stockholm library was dropped after a firestorm of criticism.)

Before squawking angrily about “political correctness”—a tired parrot-phrase if ever there was one—let’s consider the charge on its merits.

“The image the Tintin books give of Africans is Afro-phobic, for example,” explained the man in charge of the Swedish library’s youth department. “Africans are a bit dumb, while Arabs sit on flying carpets and Turks smoke water pipes.”

Although no Arab sits on a flying carpet in any Tintin book that I can recall, and many Turkish women and men do in real life smoke the shisha or waterpipe (about a third of Turkish university students do so), it is also true that no sane person can read Tintin in the Congo without being at least slightly horrified.  Even in the later Tintin books, black people are depicted as having big, red, mouth-ringing lips and are typically childish in mentality.  The American Indians in Tintin in America are pure caricature.  Arabs are not as meanly represented in Tintin books as they are in many American news media, but the image is not, let’s say, always flattering—although to be fair, one would have to disentangle representations of nasty characters (there are European villains, too) from nasty racial characteristics, a distinction perhaps not always clear.

Is there racism in some Tintin books?  Yes.  Should Tintin books be removed from libraries?  No.

First, the case for removal: let our Swedish librarian speak again.  “Children don’t read the fine print, they just get into the story immediately. The biased picture is stigmatizing. Tintin provides a caricature with a colonial perspective. Young children absorb the information uncritically.”

Isn’t this true?  Aren’t children suggestible, and can’t literature—yes, even our beloved medium, comics—instill bigotry in them, teach them falsehoods?  Also true.  The same ability to go smack right through your eyeballs into the place where your emotions live that makes comics so good also makes them extremely effective in hatemongering and propaganda.  Cartoons were widely used by the Nazis to instill loathing of Jews and other groups.  American superhero comics were replete, during World War II, with racist images of Japanese.

So yes, Tintin is racist, and racist comics can potentially instill racism.  There is some case, not absurd, for stripping the shelves.  Here are a few thoughts on why, nevertheless, we should not do so:

•  Purism is imperialistic: the same principle must apply to all materials, not just Tintin books.  Therefore, it is no surprise that, according to the Swedish news source cited earlier, the “staff at the library is working on investigating the content of other children’s books in the department in the aim of giving a consistent image for their readers without stereotypes, gender issues, or homophobia.”   The last non-empty shelf at the Kulturhuset will, one can foresee, hold a few edifying young-adult novels published in the last decade or two, a picture-book on Birds of the World, one saccharine comic about unicorns, and little else.  And it won’t be worth visiting.

•  While merrily purifying the wee ones’ mindscape, I suddenly remember that human beings of all ages can be harmed by bad ideas.  (Anyone think that Mein Kampf didn’t do any harm?  Show of hands?)  So, naturally, at the Kulturhuset, “[e]ven the adult literature is getting a thorough re-reading” with an eye to purification . . . although no word, yet, on what specific adult books may be purged.  One might have thought that moving Tintin in the Congo to the adult section of the library, or to an in-between “parental guidance” section, might have been a workable compromise, but how can even that be allowed?  Adults must be protected too!

•  Let’s not kid ourselves: books, including comic books, can and do harm us.  But real books are also, typically, mixed: the Tintin series, as a whole, conveys a complex and ultimately compassionate sense of life, as do the Dr. Dolittle books, which also contain racism (the first book, at least).  And purist, censorious attitudes themselves do harm, as a weekend in Taliban territory might convince you.  Free societies are those that gamble on the ability of a vital, uncontrolled culture to survive its own impurities.  So, while I would agree that it is appropriate to keep some materials out of the hands of children (and no single rule can ever adjudicate all such cases, so there will always be some disagreement about what is fitting and what is not), I contend that (a) it is essentially impossible to fully purify any section of any library, and (b) even the attitude that it would be good to do so is itself a form of bigotry—and one that has arguably done about as much harm in history as any other.  All totalitarianisms are founded on it.

I suspect that children absolutely shielded from scary traditional fairy-tales, sexism of any kind, any depiction of any kind of violence, and any kind of racism or impurity in print, word, or image may grow up weaker-minded and more susceptible, as teens and adults, to the seductions of bigots, magic-peddlers, extremists, nationalists, and demagogues of all sorts.  There is some support for the scientific hypothesis that parents who provide physically too-clean environments are actually harming their kids, who tend to end up with more asthma and allergies than their dog-kissing counterparts (support here ; contradiction here).  Alternatively, look at the Kulturhuset’s idea of protecting the kiddies as an abstinence-only program for the soul.  Just say No to bad ideas, kids . . . or wait, actually, we’ll say No for you . . .  Here, too, girls kept supposedly “pure” by abstinence-only education actually end up with more pregnancies than their peers receiving normal sex education.   While argument by analogy is dangerous, I believe that a parallel exists in the realm of culture.  To remain sane in an impure world, start early to cope with its impurity.  Learn to eat fish with bones in it.  Learn to extract sustenance from that which is imperfect.

Tintin isn’t a bad place to start.

Actually, I hate fish.