Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
Today "we" find the idea to be wrong - most of us anyway. But that doesn't mean that everyone found the idea to be right and "just the way things are" 100 years ago. Racism and sexism has existed for a very long time, but so has resistance to it. The civil rights and feminist movements didn't spring from a void in the mid twentieth century.
I expect to find at least some characters behaving in an authentically racist and sexist way in books written long ago (as I expect to find them, at least some of the time, in modern realistic fiction) - but when an author makes their own vicious racism or sexism clear in their writing, I definitely find it offputting.
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I didn't mean that they did, just that those who didn't support such were often not in a position to change things. Either those who did had more power or more numbers most likely. And there was the power of propaganda as well. The case of the American Indian back then is an example. They were often considered savages because of what they did to european settlers, but the news accounts probably downplayed how the U.S. Army and at least some settlers committed just as violent acts against the indians. The victor writes the history book. History is replete with one side of a conflict making the other side look bad so that they had to be kept down or wiped out. Fiction just reflects that dynamic I think. As I said in an earlier post no one writes in a vacuum. Each author is influenced by his/her world around them in some way or other. Look at how some groups were portrayed by Dickens for example.