Years ago, trawling through a friend’s extensive collection of 1950s Ladybird books (I loved the history tales, and can still see Alfred’s horror at the burned cakes), my small daughter found one about becoming a doctor that featured only men. Yet I was once brought up short by evidence of how books shape perceptions. In the general context of Mammy Two Shoes – a black, grown-up woman coexisting with a cat and a mouse locked in very human scheming – I struggle to see that the blackness of the adult and her subordinate role in the household is likely to have a profound influence on the way a child understands the world in which she lives. But as a child I wept for the motherless elephant, cruelly orphaned by wicked big game hunters, who was befriended by a charming elderly French lady he meets in Paris and returns to his homeland to introduce the ideal city, Celesteville, named in authentically colonial style after his wife. I can now see that my own favourite character, Babar, is among many other things a hero of several tales that consistently promote the superiority of western ways over African life.
It’s painful, relocating one’s understanding of stories that are old friends, whose characters and experiences permeate one’s memories of childhood. This is the cue for an argument that cuts through attitudes like a cheese wire: mirth and derision at political correctness on the one hand, and agonised uncertainty from everyone else. Tom and Jerry join a long and growing list of old favourites that are suddenly denounced for failing the test of contemporary sensitivities. The animations, it warns, represent “some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society … that were wrong then and are wrong now”. E arly Tom and Jerry cartoons that feature Mammy Two Shoes, the stereotype black maid, now carry a health warning on Amazon.
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