Are Roald Dahl Books Racist?

[DangerousBeanz]

I've been reading a thread on a Facebook page where someone asked for recommendations for children's books. Someone suggested Roald Dahl as a good choice for characters who didn't conform to gender stereotypes, and another contributer said his books were racist.
Now I've never noticed any racism, but it kind of kicked off a bit and the recommended was told that if she couldn't see the problem she was part of the problem even though she only asked for examples of how and said she'd never noticed that aspect to the stories.
I didn't like to ask how and which books in case I got slagged off too.
So AIBU in thinking Roald Dahl children's books are fab and not racist or have I really missed something?

I didn't know Dahl had been so anti-simitic. That is very disappointing.

@CountFosco we were recently given a set of Wishing Chair books and I was also taken aback about the character's name. I instinctively substituted Pixie while reading and now have to remember every time. DS is now much better at reading so it won't be long before he notices and I'll try to explain.

DS is also a Dahl fan and I hadn't been aware of his anti Semitic statements until last year. It's hard to know exactly what to do when so many people whose work you have loved turn out to have been awful. It feels slightly easier to handle outdated/unacceptable views which appear in the text and can be discussed at an age-appropriate level.

There is a lot of art over the centuries that has been made by people whose behaviour was reprehensible by today's standards. We'd be wiping out an awful lot of classical music for example if we no longer listened to or played anything by composers who had questionable behaviour towards women.

Using music as an example, I'm not excusing such behaviour but I'm not sure what can be gained by pretending that their compositions never existed. Particularly because music evolves and it's very hard to study later music without listening to specific earlier composers.

I'm just referring to music because it's a topic I know a little bit about, but I'm guessing the same applies to art and literature?

(Not that Roald Dahl is important literature in that sense, but just as a general point about people's behaviour versus their art.)

You can always find the answer you want to find by googling it.

Just saying.

Alternatively you can read his books and come to a more sensible view that isn't based on a few random quotes. When I read his description of his time in Tanzania, I could easily see it misinterpreted by someone with no sense of how big the cultural divide was, ie, someone who thinks that Tanzanians were culturally identical to Dahl, just not white (which they weren't and aren't). But if you insist on a quote, here's one from that chapter:

In those benighted days of Empire it was considered impertinent for a black man to understand English, let alone to speak it.

(Therefore, Dahl leaned Swahili, which puts him one up on most of us on this thread). Hardly pro-Empire.

As for the anti-Semitism, I'll believe that when the quotes are properly referenced. Even then, considering that he fought in the Eastern Med, flying a Hurricane in extremely hazardous circumstances and nearly died in the process, armchair accusations of anti-Semitism are a little lazy, to be honest.

Someone above referred to a story where an Indian is verbally abused by a British person. It's clear that the latter is being an arsehole, and the story certainly doesn't suggest that the Indian was being put in his place.

Accusing people like Dahl of racism casts the net so widely that it devalues the accusation of its seriousness. He wasn't racist and nor were his stories.

I think he was a product of his time. Charlie and the chocolate factory makes uncomfortable reading from a racial perspective when you consider the original descriptions of the Oompa Loompas. And his women - they must either be good and beautiful or evil.

Blyton is worse - I was reading to my niece from one of my childhood famous five books and it was very jarring to see the N word there. Of course children in Dorset in the 1940's would probably never have seen a person of colour, but still! The "little house" books are the same; they are terribly racist about the native Americans that the pioneers were replacing!

That being said, I grew up loving all these books - but I never believed for a second that I was "only a girl" or "gosh, almost as good as a boy". Just as I knew that these days ordinary children don't have cooks and go off in caravans by themselves for weeks at a time! I think it would be tragic to prevent kids from reading them; we just need to make sure they understand that it was a different time and fortunately people think differently now.

Then again, say I were Jewish and I read Dahl's comments about the holocaust, or Native American reading the "little house" books, I may well think quite differently again.

I think the comments about the Little House books are unfair. LIW deliberately did not sugarcoat the history which was brutal for everyone but the description of the Native Americans leaving in LHOTP is heartrending and is not written by a racist person even it's describing a racist government act. There was a lot to discuss when I read the books with DD1 but Laura's viewpoint was not problematic.

"....... a nice guy who wrote cute kid stories instead of a vile antisemite.

Perhaps he was both of these things ?"

JaffaCakes4TeaNow What? Putting aside the offensiveness of your statement, that literally doesn't actually make any sense. Someone can't be both nice and vile, they are opposites.

Someone can't be both nice and vile, they are opposites

I think they can actually. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is Martin McGuiness. He was known to be a lovely man, kind, generous, good humoured, a great boss to the civil servants who worked for him in his later years. He was also heavily involved in an organisation who were responsible for the deaths of very many innocent people. He was both vile and nice.

He's obviously not the only one but it was just an example that came into my head.

My best friend is an Orthodox Jew and was never allowed his books in the house.

It is also said that the witches were based on Orthodox Jews and were another indication of his vile opinions - wearing of wigs and sensible shoes.

Isn't the "Chinese telephone" joke (CATGGE) a tad ... old hat ?

Yes, even when I first read it in the early 90s I was uncomfortable about the Chinese telephone jokes in Great Glass Elevator.

On the other hand, the last time I read CATGGE was probably 1977 or 1978, so any child psychologists (real or armchair) can have that as anecdote about off-humour and retention ...

I don’t believe in editing out the past, wiping out anything that doesn’t chime with 21st century liberality doesn’t accomplish anything.

All it does is stop new generations learning from the past.

So read, and then discuss, it’s great to see the insight even very young children can have when they’re encouraged to explore ideas around our society, our modern ideals and how different eras lived and believed in different and sometimes very unpleasant ways.

Having said that, I hated reading the Twits to DS last year. The nastiness of the characters to each other was so extreme and distasteful. The abhsive nature of their marriage was pretty horrible. I was a bit worried about how DS would take it, but he was fine, having a less jaded world view than me, he dismissed their cruelty as natural because they were ‘the baddies’ so of course did awful bad things.

I don’t believe in editing out the past, wiping out anything that doesn’t chime with 21st century liberality doesn’t accomplish anything.

What I find slightly more sinister is when books, stories are changed, but then presented as the original, with no indication that they have been butchered bowdlerised. Especially as by doing so, you are effectively sanitising the past, rather than highlighting how far we've come (or not, as the case may be).

He was an extremely odd man in real life and I can easily imagine him being quite unpleasant when he wanted to be.

Thinking about The Witches and orthodox Jewish women though, isn't one of the trademarks of a witch that she never wears sensible shoes, in order to disguise the fact that she had square feet with no toes?

The Witches is ideologically quite interesting. The witches are evil and female, but Grandmother is a fabulous female character who subverts Dahl's usual "nasty old bat" treatment of older women.

You could easily see the witches as unrepentant Nazi allegories, and Grandmother as an ageing Simon Wiesenthal character.

The ending of the book is one of the most subtle and moving I've read, too.

I think ma's comments about "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" and Laura's descriptions aren't too great, but of course they were heavily edited by her daughter ("the ghost in the little house" is a great read for anyone who is interested in the ingalls books. You can also get "pioneer girl", which has the original drafts and explanatory notes and shows some of the many letters exchanged with rose where she suggests changes. So much was missed out of the books!).

This is a very interesting take on it: digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=greatplainsquarterly

(I mean that her daughter, being younger and much more worldly, ensured they were written in a more palatable way, given what actually happened and what the books actually describe)

I don’t believe in editing out the past, wiping out anything that doesn’t chime with 21st century liberality doesn’t accomplish anything.

All it does is stop new generations learning from the past.

So read, and then discuss, it’s great to see the insight even very young children can have when they’re encouraged to explore ideas around our society, our modern ideals and how different eras lived and believed in different and sometimes very unpleasant ways.

Completely agree.

Rewriting the past is both insidious and dangerous. The wilful denial in some posts here is reprehensible.

And sometimes just different ways. You know, all the same criticisms made of Dahl could be made of George Orwell. I reckon it would be very easy to cherry-pick some quotes from Burmese Days perhaps together with some random quotes from outside his books, and then accuse him of racism or, even more patronisingly, say he was a "product of his time". It would be very easy to miss the point that Orwell spent his life fighting oppression and that as a product of his time he knew more about them then we do, and accordingly his opinions deserve respect and are not automatically inferior to ours. So with Dahl.

I really, really couldn't care less if the Witches are modelled on Jewish women. They both wear wigs, and there the similarity ends. This is hardly something akin to a Nazi textbook.

Of course he had different ideas.

Educated, public school, army life, lived in Africa.

He was a product of his time - similar to Enid Blyton.

His books are so popular with kids because they aren't all sunshine and light though - they are not simply fairy tales.

The ending of the book is one of the most subtle and moving I've read, too.
I too loved the book ending of The Witches. Beware the 1990 film, which was great in many ways, but the film ending was well and truly bowdlerised. Roald Dahl himself allegedly stood outside cinemas with a megaphone, telling people not to see it. It was the year he died too.

you can read anything into anything if you use the right critical theory for it.

This. Absolutely. 100%

Especially in children’s literature because it’s so open to interpretation.