View Single Post
Old 01-20-2018, 02:31 PM   #61
Froide
Wizard
Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Froide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Froide's Avatar
 
Posts: 1,898
Karma: 9851695
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Noo Yawk
Device: Samsung Galaxy and Windows devices. RIP: Palm & Nook devices.
Two instances come immediately to mind:

I couldn't stomach finishing Jack London's A Daughter of the Snows. Wikipedia notes: "Modern commentators have criticized the novel for its approval of the main character's view that Anglo-Saxons are racially superior." - source: Cassuto, Leonard; Reesman, Jeanne Campbell (1998). Rereading Jack London. Stanford University Press. p. 161. ISBN 9780804735162.

I did finish John Grisham's novel, A Time To Kill (1988), although I was shocked by the words and images he used to describe the black defendant, Carl Lee, padding toward him, barefoot, black, leathery soles slapping against the floor (or some words to that effect, which evoke images of an animal, not a man). Although I read the book years ago, when it was first released, I distinctly remember rereading that passage in an effort to give Grisham the benefit of the doubt - i.e., to discern whether Grisham was describing the prisoner through the lens of the culture depicted in the book, or through his own. Unfortunately, I concluded (reluctantly): the context in which Grisham cast that black character as subhuman reflects more on the author (who hails from Mississippi) and the way he was conditioning the reader to view the character, not on the redneck racists in the fictional Mississippi community where the book's set.

[EDITED to italicize A Daughter of the Snows, which I initially punctuated as if it were a short story.]

Last edited by Froide; 01-21-2018 at 01:56 AM.
Froide is offline   Reply With Quote