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Originally Posted by HarryT
Are you able to say what that editing change was in the case you describe? I'd be interested to know.
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Outside of that particular chapter in the 32nd book, readers never come across groups of characters that could be confused for real-world characters in any of the other 39 books.
Then, out of the blue, this wizard has a legion of "black slaves." They are called "the blacks" all over that chapter and the adjective black is sprinkled in all over the place--"the black boy," "he raised his black hand," etc. There are also a couple illustrations showing them in the stereotypical caricature style from the 1930's.
I didn't want to remove illustrations so I instead tried to move them to a different context. This is a bit different than what we've been talking about with words like "faggot" in that I did change the intended meaning. Instead of black human slaves that could have been dropped into the US and fit right in picking cotton, I made them humanoid slaves made of black stone.
I searched the entire 40-book series to make sure the change fit with the lore and I tried to come up with any possible reason the slaves needed to be regular black humans. I couldn't. What I knew was, aside from these slaves, non-white people never show up in the entire series--not as heroes or villains or anything. The series had no connection to religion, politics, race, or any of the unpleasantries of real life. It's a light whimsical place accessible to readers of all races, religions, and ages. That's why I made a major change to one very minor detail.
A young reader goes through 31 books in this magical land. Their imaginations are running wild. They get to the end of the 32nd book and maybe they wind up in a talk about "reality" with their parents. Maybe their parents make them skip that book. The worst thing in my mind, though, is a non-white reader hitting book 32, heads full of fantasy and thinking of all they'd do if they were in the magical land, and then finding out that there are actually people that look just like them in the book. And those people are slaves. And then maybe that non-white reader isn't so keen on adventuring in a land where the only other people like him are slaves.
Anyhow, an entirely accessible series had one unnecessary sliver of inaccessibility. I pulled that sliver and gave parents and readers another option. The one minor detail made the book a black-eye
on the whole series and on that writer's body of work. It's akin to reading 39 books in a series, getting to the end of the 40th book, and having a main character in the otherwise completely neutral series say, "don't be such a Jew."