Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I still come back to thinking this was more about class prejudices than racism. The book a few times highlights the savagery of the white sailors, which Tarzan compares unfavourably to his animal companions. And also this previously quoted line: "To add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State—a pitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe."
Another line emphasising Tarzan's superior breeding: "It was a stately and gallant little compliment performed with the grace and dignity of utter unconsciousness of self. It was the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate."
The book places much emphasis of the importance of his noble birth - so not racism as such, or so it seems to me, just: everyone else is crap except those of noble birth. Although, as I noted earlier, there are a few places where individual difference is allowed to creep in as a force separate to breeding.
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Sure, you can say it's class not race, but it's a distinction without much of a difference. Only white people are of noble birth. And the white people who aren't part of the aristocracy (e.g., Jane and the other Americans, the Frenchmen) are still mostly depicted as superior; the exceptions are the sailors who mutiny and King Leopold's Belgians--I did note with some surprise that indictment of them to explain the tribe's savagery.
I forgot about Black Michael as being another specific, named non-white character; he's kind of a mixed bag, as he is honorable enough to protect John and Alice, but doesn't arrange for their rescue.
I'm backtracking on my earlier assertion about the racism not seeming too problematic for the times.